


Laughing With A Mouth of Blood

by voxDei



Series: Space Monsters [1]
Category: Warframe
Genre: Blood, Body Horror, F/M, Gore, Oral, Really slow burn on the relationship front, Various sex acts in later chapters, abusive behavior on both sides, dubcon, insofar as repeated murder attempts can be boiled down to 'abusive'
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-02
Updated: 2017-07-30
Packaged: 2018-05-30 18:20:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 19
Words: 56,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6435391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voxDei/pseuds/voxDei
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is what happens when you mistake a thousand-year old prison for an Orokin artifact and accidentally let a vampire loose in your base.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I have no explanation for this.

The pod was not like the others. It was more like a casket really, black and ornate, with crawling red runes that spiraled out from wherever it touched the ground. The pattern was over six feet in diameter, and it frightened the men. Alad V was not afraid. Alad V had trained himself not to be. Zanuka had no capacity for fear. Both watched the men work. 

The men were his team of specialized scientists, the best he could threaten or bribe into his service. They were supervised by a group of very well paid guards, both for their safety, and to encourage their loyalty. Scans of the pod showed no heartbeat, no brain activity, no electromagnetic energy. Even the runes seemed all but inert. Sonar scans showed something humanoid inside the pod, but far smaller than any Tenno he had seen. Now, they would open it.

They had expected traps, seals, even a simple lock. But it opened easily, if a bit squeakily; the hinges needed oiling. Inside was a girl in black clothes, half-curled on her side, still and pale against the red satin lining. She could be sleeping. She could be dead. She probably was, the men muttered, body preserved by some Orokin power, for whatever reason. They started to relax, unafraid of a mere corpse. The research progressed, the runes continued their slow coil. 

Samples were to be taken from the body; hair, skin, fluids. The scientist to do so did not hesitate, the atmosphere in the lab had calmed significantly. He pressed the edge of a scalpel to the outside of her forearm, to slice off a strip of flesh for study. That was very foolish of him.

Alarms screamed, the runes flared with blinding light, and the dazzle faded to show the girl's hand locked around the scientist's throat, holding him nearly off the ground. His yells are tinny and flat-sounding through the filter of his helmet, but he can soon scream in ernest when she sits up enough to pop the helmet off his head with her other hand. 

The guards rush in formation, but the newly active runes bounce them back with a transparent red field, a dome over the web of symbols. The girl's mouth splits into a rictus of a grin, teeth jagged and razor sharp. The man in her grip writhes in terror, hacking wildly with his scalpel. The blade bites easily, splitting her flesh, but she doesn't flinch. She doesn't bleed either. Those on the outside attack the dome, but with no effect, weapons and projectiles bouncing off it without a scratch. On the inside, the girl peels back the collar of the man's uniform, popping it at the seams and taking deep gulps of his scent. He trembles, pupils gone to pinpricks with fear. Her's are blown wide with bloodlust.

Her hold on his throat shifts nearer to his chin, and she wrenches his arm outward, stretching the tendons of his shoulder and neck taut. He chokes and struggles, managing a feeble wailing, and she grins ever wider. He is warm, and alive, and that is all she cares about. 

Her teeth shear into his throat like butter and he screams, until she crunches into his windpipe and vocal cords. Blood sprays, and her mouth closes over the torn artery, greedily swallowing. She holds his body long after it's gone still, drinking it pale. The others look on in horror, instinctively drawing back from the small dome, away from the monster. Even Alad feels that cold claw in his guts, blind terror.

The torn body is dropped, flicked aside, and the beast swings her head like a dog looking for a scent, drawing in lungfuls of air and focusing her gaze on the small crowd beyond the barrier. She rises to step out of the pod.

And trips.

One foot catches on the rim of the casket and she flops face-down on the floor, ungracefully. Someone smothers a hysterical laugh, from fear or genuine amusement no one knows. The beast growls and gets her feet under her again, unsteady, moving her lips as if swearing. She sways a moment, balancing on the balls of her feet, and then rushes the group with a savage snarl. 

They scatter, however slowly in their heavy suits-- but no need. She's staggering back, hands clutched over her nose, having bounced off the barrier like a ball bearing off of concrete. 

"Son of a motherfucking cocksucker asswipe fUCK THIS THING!" she howls, lashing blows on the line of pale red separating her from her prey. It doesn't even scratch. She screams her fury and throws herself at it like a rabid animal. The researchers finally manage the locks on the room and flee, dragging Alad with them. The monster's screeches echo after them, a phantom pursuit.

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It's sleeping. Curled up again in its casket, the monster is quiet. They found the corpse of the solitary casualty dismembered, torn apart in rage and drained even further for every drop of blood. Even the smears on the floor show signs of tongue swipes. More than one soldier is glad for his mask hiding his face. Surprisingly, though the spiraling runes remain on the floor, the barrier does not; it is a simple matter to step in and retrieve the remains for disposal. They all but refuse to speak, though, and step quietly, if at all; who knows what would happen if the creature should wake again. No one goes nearer to the pod than is strictly necessary. 

Again, Alad watches from a distance, eyes narrowed. This thing... his faction had fought hard to bring it into their possession, thinking it held some valuable Orokin artifact. But this, this is a deathtrap. Or a weapon. Avenues of action are explored in his mind, mouth twisting as he thought. If this creature could be harnessed... Never mind the cost, it would be an easy price to pay to sacrifice the lives of however many crewmen it would take to endear it to him and then, then it would be at his disposal. But first, more tests would need to be conducted. He needs more data before he can act. 

The first test is for the barrier. He sends in a soldier with a comfortingly large weapon and orders to wake the creature. Trembling, he obeys. The second her eyes open the wall is up again, and the second after that the soldier is short an arm. His death is longer than the first's, though not by much. She seems almost amused by the horror of the observers, and watches them through slitted eyes as she rips apart the body and gorges herself. She all but ignores the meat, he notes, focusing almost entirely on blood. She peels the heart and liver from their fleshy prison and sucks them dry like ripe fruit, tossing the husks over her shoulder. 

She paces for hours after that, eyes roving back and forth over the assembled men. There aren't many, just enough to keep an eye on the sensors and a few that came to see the facility's new monster, and they hide their fear well, now they know she can't get at them. Eventually she grows bored and retreats back to the casket, thumping the lid down with obvious irritation. A half hour later, the barrier vanishes.

The next step is establishing contact with it. In a non-lethal way, that is. The creature spoke before, however vulgar it was, and presumably it could be persuaded to speak again. He orders a restrained Grineer prisoner brought and the room otherwise cleared, and attempts to wake the creature from a distance. After the fourth spare screwdriver had sailed into the casket she pops up, yowling in indignation. He stands with his bargaining chip just beyond the barrier. 

"What now?"

He spreads his hands magnanimously. "I would like to talk."

She blinks. "Talk."

A sly smile twitches the corners of his mouth. "Yes, to, ah, gain a better understanding of who, exactly, my facilities are playing host to."

"That's a fancy way of saying you know fuck all about me."

"Not precisely — I know what you eat," he gestures at the restrained prisoner, stripped of armor and muted with a gag. She eyes it, nostrils flaring. "It is yours if you answer my questions." 

"...fine."

"What are you?"

She snorts, leaning against the casket on its dais. "Strigoi. Nosferatu. Vampire. Come on, genius, it's not that hard." But she blinks at his look of incomprehension. "You really don't know?"

At his head shake she whistles. "Fuck, I really was in there a long time wasn't I. Or I'm a very long way away... Or both, really. Anyway," she clarifies, waving a hand, "undead, snappy-bitey thing. Likes fresh blood, doesn't like the sun, pretty darn simple."

"What is your name?"

She shows teeth in what might be a smile. "Rocket."

"How does the barrier work?"

She curls her lip, contemptuous. "Damn thing's active when I am, dormant when I'm asleep, that much should be obvious. It's a rather clever trap, really, there's no way to get me out while I'm conscious, and only allows entry when I'm temporarily harmless. Course, when the wall goes up it traps everything inside it, not just me."

He mulls this over for a few minutes, hands fidgeting absently in their big gloves, and his next question surprises her; "How do I get you out?"

Her eyes narrow. "Now why would you want something like that? I eat people, you'd think that'd be an incentive to toss this box and me in it in the nearest bottomless pit, though," she pauses, seeing his expression, "I probably shouldn't be looking this gift horse in the mouth... The only way I can think of is to wait till I conk out again and carry me out without waking me."

He frowns slightly, turning the possibility over in his mind. Then, "I think I have a way."

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

She had flatly refused to be drugged into a stable sleep. Didn't trust him, or the circumstances, and hated the taste, and a hundred other reasons. In the end they decided on Ospreys. It took another two hours for the barrier to come down again, and when it did two of the hovering robots drifted over the open casket, engines as silent as they could go. They were fitted with temporary sets of grasping legs, and these they edged gingerly under her body and slowly, carefully, lifted her up and out. It was rather quick, really, they kept a steady pace the dozen or so feet to the edge of the barrier, and then into a side room meant for Crewmen to have their breaks in. She's lowered with equal care onto the small couch, and then they extract their legs and drift off.

The first thing she does is order the casket destroyed. "Smash it up, burn it, throw it into the sun, I don't care, just so long as it's gone. Too damn dangerous to leave lying around, I will not get trapped in there again." The second thing she does is take her reward for cooperating with Alad V, gorging herself on the Grineer captive's blood. She runs her tongue under her nails after, slouched on the couch and practically purring. After a while she passes out again - you'd think being asleep for a few centuries would have provided all the rest she needed, but she mumbled something about getting used to being conscious again - and stays asleep for a good ten hours. He next finds her wandering around the labs with sharp roving eyes, examining closely whatever catches her interest. She seems puzzled by the Corpus lettering on the walls and equipment, squinting at it. "Looks like cyrillic... Never was good at reading Russian," she mutters to herself, "too fancy an alphabet for such a glottal language."

She peers out the large plate windows at the gaseous sea, eyes narrowed against the diffused light. Her gaze is distrustful. She's... small, he notices, can't be more than five-two, to use an arcane measuring system. Long, ratty hair, thin wrists, and a loping way of walking that makes her seem so much bigger, so intimidating. Standing still, her attention elsewhere, she almost seems frail. 

The impression is broken cleanly in two when she raises her head and sniffs, doglike. She blinks once, then turns on her heel and fairly bounds down the hall, leading with her nose; she bursts into a crewman breakroom, startling the occupants into sudden silence. Ignoring them for once, she makes a beeline for the coffeemaker with a squeal of glee. "You've got coffee! You yahoos have real actual coffee!" She doesn't bother to ask permission, pouring a generous mugful and practically hopping up and down. The crewmen share a look. "Can you even have normal food?" She barks out a laugh, flashing her teeth. "Don't care!" and downs the whole mug. 

"Why didn't someone stop meeeeeeeeeee," she whines half an hour later, curled into a sorry comma on the side room couch. "You people are supposed to be sensible, I sure as fuck won't be." Her gut's in cramps from what it can only identify as Not Blood Therefore Bad, and the caffeine's given her jitters; she claws at the upholstery like a restless cat, and foam gushes out of two or three larger rips. One of the crewmen gingerly hands her a heating pack, and she thanks him with a sulky "Fuck you. Fuck everything." and hugs it to her stomach.


	2. Chapter 2

He miscalculated badly. She doesn’t consider herself under any obligation to him, no debt of gratitude for releasing her, only vicious greed at what’s now before her. He berates her over the fifth corpse that day, scolding acidly, and she turns, lunges—

Teeth on his skin, a weight pressed against him, and sudden pain, a tight hot clench of fangs puncturing flesh. He strangles out a choked scream, heart pounding like a trapped bird, beating itself senseless against his ribs, and the creature killing him draws in thick, greedy swallows of his blood. God, he's going to die, she's going to kill him here, leave him an empty withered husk to tear apart at her leisure. 

She practically vibrates against him, breathless with obvious sadistic pleasure, and he can feel her warming tongue kneading his flesh. He recoils, sick with horror and fear, and she bites harder into the side of his throat, drawing a gasping whimper from him. Her hand slides up to touch his face, making him flinch. She cups his jawline, mockingly tender, her other hand braced against the wall behind them for support. His breath is coming short and fast, he feels faint; at what point does the human body shut down from exsanguination again? How much has she taken already? He's shaking, knees weak enough to give entirely, were it not for her weight pinning him to the wall. 

Now the pain recedes, slightly, and he can hear her panting loudly in his ear, chin digging into his shoulder. She turns her head again, and he yelps; her tongue is scraping across the wound she's made. But no teeth, this time, only a slow, methodical lapping, catching the slow ooze of blood. After the fourth stroke his legs finally buckle and he goes down, pulling her with him, her frantic energy subsided. She's jostled lose when they slump to the floor, and lands on her side, giggling drunkenly. Her mouth is stained scarlet and he skitters back, putting feeble distance between him and her teeth. The side of his neck burns and he claps a hand to it, glove tacky against the drying blood. She levers herself up on her elbows, grinning languidly. "Oh that was _delicious_ , Alad, you have no _idea_." She half-lunges forward and grabs his ankle, smile now savage. "I could just eat you the rest of the way up."

He squeaks and thrashes, kicking at her hand with his other boot. "You will do no such thing y-you, you reprehensible _monster_."

Her tongue lolls out of her mouth, saliva still streaked red. The sight of it turns his stomach. "And why is that? What can you do to stop me?" She pulls herself closer over his legs, eyes bright and so scarlet it hurt to look at them. "You have nothing, old man, no weapons that could put me down for long, no way to save yourself." Her hand closes on his knee and squeezes, grinding cartilage together and making him gasp sharply. "I could eat you by _inches_."

He narrows his eyes, suddenly steely, and kicks hard, at the same time grabbing wildly for his dislodged collar. She hisses, thrown off balance by his thrashing, and he yanks the disk back into place, the visor slotting down automatically. The shrill beeping that fills the room makes the creature turn her head, and then before she can react Zanuka is upon her, hissing in rage. 

They grapple, the creature snarling and clawing at his own loyal beast, claws skating off the metal and throwing sparks. Zanuka struggles to pin her, angling her tail for a missile strike that puts small craters in the floor and stuns the bloodsucker momentarily; she pounces, trapping her limbs with her own clawed feet. Alad's struggled to stand, and now flees to the other side of the room, the creature howling rage and frustration. Zanuka snarls sharply and slams her tail to the ground, sending out a static shockwave that flashes and sparks, tearing a harsh scream from the vampire; a real scream of real pain, he notices dimly, more focused on stopping the bleeding of his neck wound than anything. 

She slumps limply after that, smoking slightly and obviously spent. She growls sullenly when he creeps nearer, glaring at him with slitted ruby eyes, but makes no move to fight further. He flees the room, leaving her pinned under his pet; he has to do something about this, fast.

 

——————————————————————————————————————————

 

What he does is summon her as politely as he knows how and offer her a stemmed glass, full nearly to the top with blood. His own, even, to sweeten her further. Her eyes flick from it to him and she takes it, sipping it daintily with impressive restraint. “So what do you want n-” The crewman nearest to her lunges mid-sentence, spinning his polearm and catching her in the throat with the clasp at the end; it snaps shut on contact, sealing itself, and she shrieks and lashes out, another crewman tackling her waist and sending them both crashing down. The glass flies from her hand and shatters, spilling scarlet on the pale floor. She howls and thrashes, goring the crewmen who had tackled her, and clawing for the one with the polearm when the first is dragged off her. But the pole attached to the clasp is more than long enough to keep him out of her reach, and he uses that leverage to keep her pinned down long enough for others to snap her wrists in matching cuffs of similar design, pinning her more completely. She struggles and snaps her teeth like a rabid animal, kicking wildly, but her restraints deliver a high-voltage jolt that makes her arch and scream, sizzling in her hair. She slumps down, panting, and Alad walks closer, hands clasped behind his back. She glares up at him, full of venom, and his smile is sly and self-assured. “You were wrong. I have weapons against you aplenty, and now you have no more power against us.”

She snarls, stretched out on her back, painfully vulnerable. “And what would you do with me, hand me back to the Grineer for a solid gold ass-cushion? Slit me open and see how long it takes for my lungs to grow back?” She’s spitting the words like chips of ice, cold fury coloring each syllable. He kneels down and takes hold of her chin; her lip curls, a clear warning spelled out in the curve of her fangs. He smiles. “No. No you are far too valuable to throw away as simple as that… you will serve a greater purpose, yes. You will hunt Tenno for me.” 

She blinks, actually surprised. “I.. what?” A shade of annoyance creeps into his voice. “The Tenno have gotten better at killing my Harvesters, and they are too valuable to waste like that. But you, I’ve seen what you can do to Tenno, and I’ve seen what they can do to you. Having you hunt them for me would be… ideal, yes.”

A moment’s pause, and then she hisses, “And why the fuck should I do tha-AAAAAAA!” Her restraints deliver another punishing shock, arching her back off the ground and causing her legs to scrabble franticly at the floor. The electricity subsides after a moment and she’s left panting and limp again, choking back a whimper. The corner of Alad’s mouth angles up. “Through this collar you will obey me. Of course, should you perform well you will be rewarded. I am generous like that.” He releases her jaw and stands up, turning away. “And of course should you attempt to attack me or my work you will suffer greatly.” The crewmen disengage their poles from the restraints, removing their leverage but leaving the collar and cuffs. She rolls over on all fours and starts scrabbling at the collar, growling; it sends a warning tingle of static into her skin and she pauses, then slowly lowers her hands. Alad V smiles, seeing profit piling up in his future - and control, too, control over this powerful, hugely dangerous monster. He will not be that vulnerable ever again. 

 

—————————————————————————————————————————

 

“Tenno, Tenno listen.” She clings to the edges of the tiny window in her cell, breath hissing against the grate. The shape beyond moves, ignoring her, checking the other cells for its target. “Tenno please! Let me out, get this thing off me, and I will help you. You want him dead, yes? You want his guts hanging from the ceiling?” Her tongue flickers out over dry lips. “I can do that. I want him dead as much as you do, get me out and I will kill him!”

The Warframe on the other side has found its target, a squealing civilian captive, and it hands him a sidearm and makes for the door. She howls, clawing at her cell door, as gunfire and robotic screeches fill the air beyond the cellblock. She hunches back down, the light in the ceiling of her cell too bright, too harsh, and she bows her head against it, snarling in little breathy fits. Fuck them, fuck him, fuck all of this. The collar is tight and unyielding and it chafes dammit, she’s scratched raw patches under it already. She bows her head away from the light and hates him.


	3. Chapter 3

He follows the locator in her collar deep to the other side of the base, having to duck through more than one air vent in pursuit of the little blinking dot. He finally finds her in a tiny disused storeroom, its contents long since looted, and now replaced with a pile of stolen soft things; blankets, pillows, couch cushions, anything she could find that was comfortable to touch and would fit into this closet space. It was into this nest of fabric that she was burrowed, only detectable by means of her bonds. The pile shifts as he enters, and utters a muffled growl. “Go away.”

“You neglected to report in.”

“Here’s your report: fuck you.”

He scowls and stumps over, ripping the top layers of blanket away. She hisses and burrows deeper, whining when the cuffs on her wrists lock together magnetically. She wriggles and winces, inhaling sharply, and he frowns. Ordinarily she’d be snapping at him, snarling insults, not subdued like this. He peers closer at her, wary. She’s got her bound arms wrapped awkwardly around her torso, trying not to cringe. She sees him looking and growls. “They broke my fucking ribs.”

“Can’t you heal from that?” 

“Of course I can, doesn’t mean it doesn’t fucking hurt.” 

After a minute the cuffs unlock from each other and she huffs, digging herself deeper into the pile. Alad is at a loss for what to do; this is unknown territory for him, she’s not attacking, or sniping, or… anything really, she’s just _there_ , sulking and in actual pain. With one hand on her collar controls he sits down slowly, wedging himself between her nest and the wall of this tiny room. There’s hardly any room to move in here, and the light’s dim and sputtering. He supposes she likes it that way. After a few minutes she huffs and noses her head out of the pile, looking at him. He blinks, and she makes a noise and turns her head to rest it, facing away from him. He watches her for a minute longer, but she makes no further movement, not even the show of teeth he was beginning to think was her most basic way of communicating anger. Her hair, he notices, had been hacked short. Well, shorter than it had been, which was still fairly long for Corpus standards; it’s two, maybe three inches now. It looks soft. 

He frowns and shakes his head. She’s not some, some _kubrow_ , to be petted and scratched, she’s a half-feral corpse with a taste for his blood. ….A half-feral corpse currently restrained beyond all hope of harm to him. And current discomfort notwithstanding, she doesn’t look like she’s in the mood to try to take a chunk out of him now, not with the shock she’ll get if she tries. And she hasn’t hidden herself completely, or tried to kick him out…

She stiffens slightly at his first touch, the rubber of his glove catching at her hair, but she relaxes slightly when all he does is rest his hand there. She’s not warm, exactly, more room temperature through his glove, but it’s an interesting tactile sense. He moves his hand experimentally, rubbing slightly against her scalp. She seems to vibrate slightly and he stops, watching her. The vibrations, very faint already, die away when he stops moving. Odd.

He rubs again, softly, and the vibrations start up again, along with an odd sound this time. He frowns, cocking his head at it. It sounds like… light, slow rumbling, in her chest. Is she growling? It’s no growl he’s heard from her before…

Wait, no, the resonance is wrong. She’s not growling, she’s…. purring? He blinks and leans forward, trying to get a look at her face. Her eyes are closed, a slight crease between them; her lips are moving slightly, soundlessly. He leans in closer, his fingers moving in small, soft circles, and hears, “-drian..” 

His hand stops moving and her eyes flicker open; she jerks back as if startled. He frowns at her. “What was that?”

“What was that? What was _that_?” She yanks the edge of one blanket over her head, so only her face is showing. “You were — _petting_ me!” 

“And you were purring!” 

She hisses. “I was not!”

He raises an eyebrow. She growls, unconvincingly. 

“What does ‘drian’ mean?”

She looks up at him sharply. “What?”

“You said ‘drian’, what is it?”

She looks down, shoulders hunched. After a minute she says, “Hadrian. I said Hadrian.”

He tilts his head, opening his mouth to speak, and she growls. “All my friends are _dead_ , asshole, and I’m trapped here with _you_ , and I don’t even remember how I got in the damn box in the first place, so forgive me for mourning that!” She yanks the blanket the rest of the way over her head, burrowing away from him into a ball. He blinks, digesting this. It made sense, in an absurd kind of way; she’d been alive since long before Earth’s atmosphere had even been breeched, back before his faction or the Grineer were even in their infancy. Before anyone knew about the Orokin. Of course, he had only her word for that, but why would she lie? And certainly she’d had to have had… acquaintances, at the very least. He finds it hard to imagine her being _friendly_ to anyone for any substantial period of time. 

He starts to get up, deciding to leave her to her moping. There are a few empty storage crates with holes torn in them jammed into the tiny room, and he grabs hold of the flat top of one for support getting to his feet. The crate, however, has other ideas and tips over from the sudden weight, sending his hand sliding onto its sharp torn edge, and the rest of him crashing back to the floor. He yelps at the fall, and then again at the sudden bloom of pain in his hand; the glove is sliced clean through, an inch-long cut in the meat of his palm streaming red. Beside him the nest-pile shifts and her head eels out, nostrils flared. He looks from her to his bleeding palm, suddenly nervous, and acutely aware of his position here. No escape, unstable vampire… he reminds himself sharply that she’s still bound, still controllable. 

She doesn’t even seem like she’s going to attack him, she’s just staring at his hand. She licks her lips. He closes his fist, and then winces at the pain this gesture causes. She looks at him directly. “Come on, you know I deserve it.” 

He scowls, not wanting to relive his last experience with her teeth, but… carrot and stick only works if there’s a carrot to be offered, and the wound is already open… He tries to school his expression back into line, peeling the glove off gingerly. “If you even think about biting…” 

“Yeah yeah, electroshock of doom, got it.” Her gaze is fixed on his wounded hand; he’d bled inside his glove, and enough so that it got smeared over most of the hand. He moves closer, gingerly, and offers his sliced palm. She opens her mouth for it and laves her tongue over the cut, closing her eyes in pleasure. He curls his lip, wincing slightly, and she practically suckles at his open wound. Disgusting. 

From this angle he can see her throat working, swallowing stolen lifeblood. He suppresses a shudder, mouth dry; this should feel magnanimous, shouldn’t it? He’s, he’s giving her something she needs, he could withhold it if he chose, so why…

It feels so _wrong_ , this voluntary participation in his own destruction. He should not be giving this freely.

He jerks his hand back with a sharp inhale, leaving the creature lapping at air. She hisses softly, annoyed, but does not move to pursue him. He scrambles upright, heart pounding, and flees before anything can disturb him further. She watches his coat whip away into the air duct and licks his blood from her lips, then curls deeper into her pile. Her ribs hurt less, now, and his obvious discomfort and revulsion had soothed some part of her. She had no desire for him to grow _concerned_. The next time he touched her head he’d walk away short a few fingers, electrotorture be damned. 

She wriggles until she’s found a suitably comfortable position and then stills, listening to the background hum of this place; low-key machinery, the sound of electricity, the odd series of beeps or clicks. It’s not bad, as far as white noise goes. It lulls her into a peaceful doze.

 

—————————————————————————————————————————

 

A day or two later she's got one hand braced on the crewman’s knee, the other carefully probing around the ragged bullet hole in his thigh with a pair of forceps. His face is scrunched up in pain, hers is focused tightly, zeroed in on the wound. She clicks her tongue and switches the forceps for a thin metal rod, sliding it into the hole — following the bullet trajectory, he realizes. She makes a few contemplative noises, then pulls the rod out and digs in with the forceps again, making the crewman yowl and try to squirm away. Thirty seconds, no more, and she yanks out a mangled chunk of metal the size of the tip of his thumb, smirking satisfactorily. The crewman whines and she splashes his leg with disinfectant, making him yelp and curse, and then she sets to work pressing the edges of the wound together and bandaging it up with brisk movements. 

He complains, and she shakes the ounce of metal in his face, hissing at him to run in front of the firing line again and see what happens, you idiot. She smacks his forehead, leaving a bloody handprint, and moves to the next one. 

She cracks a dislocated shoulder back into place, pulls half a shattered knife from between someone’s ribs, and sets a broken nose, all with rough, practiced movements, griping all the while about how these idiots keep going and getting themselves injured, there’s not gonna be enough left for her, and that’s damn inconsiderate. One crewman is vainly trying to keep his innards from spilling out into a messy puddle, a spear of shrapnel protruding from his eye. She looks at him appraisingly, then covers his mouth and bites into his carotid. He spasms slightly, half gone already, and he’s milky-eyed and still when she pulls away. 

She waves off their disturbed stares with a “He was gone anyway, would you rather I let him suffer?” and smears the red on her mouth with the back of her hand. She moves on down the line, patching up those that can be patched and being none too gentle about it, but she only puts one more out of his misery and they don’t glower so much at her this time. 

 

———————————————————————————————————————

 

The air that hisses out of the vents is tinged pale blue and his collar disgorges a respirator, his crew already protected by their helmets. The Tenno are here, in a full team of four, and he is not _ready_ dammit, Zanuka still limps slightly in one leg and his pet vampire is surly and uncooperative, and he wouldn’t put it past her to let him get a few bones broken before interfering on pain of electroshock. The air supply to his labs is tightly controlled, and safe to breathe for now, but who knows how soon the Tenno will breach his security. He makes arrangements, quickly, for a temporary relocation. If he can get out before they get in….

It is not to be; twenty minutes after the alarms sound they burst into the labs in a shower of mangled robotics. Zanuka greets them with a rain of missiles and frost bombs, slowing them enough to get a few good strikes in before the group can disperse. Alad hovers anxiously near the rear of the room while his pets play defense; the transport is still six minutes away, and his personal retaliations are, as usual, paltry and weak. The two beasts harass and block the Tenno from reaching him, tag-teaming the four party members with an almost practiced ease. They’d learned to work together at least some of the time, and it shows here. 

One of the intruders pulls a smoke grenade from its belt and flings it, bursting the same pale blue as seeping from the air vents. Zanuka leaps back from the cloud but the vampire simply barrels through it, gunning for a clear shot at the aggressor’s head. But she chokes, stumbles, and catches the business end of a warhammer, sending her flying. She crashes down gracelessly, and a generous amount of thick, dark blood splatters wetly to the floor. She tries to pick herself up, dripping viscous blood from her mouth and nose, but another smoke bomb explodes against her ribs and she screams, angry red welts popping open in her skin and blood fountaining from her mouth. 

Zanuka takes the brunt of the fight now, harrying and dividing the Tenno; his vampire howls first in shocked agony, then in rage. She limps to her feet and clears the battlefield, out of range of the combatants, one hand sealed tight over her mouth and nose. Alad shouts a reprimand, seeing the new holes in his defense now, but she snarls and keeps her distance from the fight.

“It’s silver nitrate, I can’t go back in there!”

“You can and you will!”

She hisses and backs up, then screams as he triggers her shock collar, convulsing in place. He quickly moves so that she’s between him and the Tenno, motioning imperiously for her to get back in the fight. She hisses low in her chest, her own dark blood staining her teeth, and stays resolutely put, facing him, and he opens his mouth to shout but his words die in his throat; something’s arcing towards him through the air, long and sharp, and he stumbles back, raising an arm—

The spear takes her in the back, thunking through muscle and viscera and out her chest, and she gapes, staggering forward from the impact. Her face opens in surprise, staring down at the foot and a half of black metal protruding from between her breasts, almost dead center. She looks back up at him, only shock on her face, and topples over facefirst, and he gives a hoarse scream, backing up in fear. Shit, shit shit shit she’s _dead_ , he’s down one bodyguard and there was so much more he'd wanted to _study_ , he wasn’t _done_ with her yet, and oh fuck they’re coming for him now.

The four Tenno bull-rush him all at once, but Zanuka, his faithful Zanuka, manages to outpace them and hit the lot of them with a frost-bomb. He’s weak-kneed with terror, but his transport is hovering outside his lab now, he’s clear, and he sprints for it, his beast racing alongside and past him. He’s not more than three steps in when something closes around one ankle, jerking him almost off his feet. 

He gives a faint little scream and looks down frantically, but it’s _her_ , she’s got his ankle gripped tight and is glaring desperately from the floor. “Don’t you… _fucking_ dare leave me…” 

He gulps for air and reaches down for her, grabbing onto her frightfully skinny arm and pulling as best he can. Zanuka doubles back and helps drag her along, leaving a dark smear of blood behind. They manage to get her into the transport mere seconds before the frost wears off of the frames and they vault the last few yards; but the door’s already closing, the ship’s already pulling away, and he’s slumped against the interior wall, hand to his chest, and sucking in great gulps of air. They made it, he’s safe. His knees threaten to give out, his face paper white. 

She’s curled up where they dropped her, still stuck through on the spear and coughing up black spatters of blood; he’s amazed she even survived, a hit like that would have finished him, finished anyone. He steps closer and she looks up to give him a withering look, but is interrupted by another heaving coughing fit; it sounds wet and raw, and she curls pitifully up against herself.

“Get this thing out of me,” she rasps, and her voice is rough and harsh, like Sargas Ruk’s. He swallows, wincing at the sight of her impalement. “No, you’ll bleed out.” She snarls, face screwed up in pain. “I _can’t_ bleed out stupid, just yank it out so I can heal.”

He steps back, stomach turning from residual fear and the image of her just sliding off the spear like skewered meat, but there’s a few crewmen already in attendance and they swarm around her, two of them bracing her body while a third takes hold of the spear and _pulls_ , and it slides out with a grisly crunching sound. He chucks it in the corner as she writhes, teeth bared in a grimace. 

They back off her slightly and he steps forward, trying to calm himself. “What was that gas?”

She hisses through her teeth, eyes narrowed in pain. “Silver nitrate, I told you. It’s a… ngh, a suspension of silver inside a liquid medium, so it can be deployed as a vapor…” Her teeth grind together, the red welts on her skin weeping red-tinted fluid. “Fuck the Lotus, how did she know! Who told her!”

He frowns, picturing the clouds of blue mist; it had had no effect on him or Zanuka, or the Tenno for that matter. “Silver burns,” she hisses at him, angry and begrudging. “Silver kills us.”

She hooks her claws into the suit of the nearest crewman, hissing hazily. “Open a vein for me, will you…” and Alad curls his lip, offended by her gluttony. “One track mind, of course,” he spits, and she growls as the crewman strips off his glove and rolls up the sleeve. “I just took a shitton of damage, I need time and blood to heal. You wanna deny me that, fine, it’ll just turn a bloodletting now into a massacre later.”

The crewman’s helmet betrays no emotion when she bites into his wrist, greedily sucking down his lifeblood; after a few minutes of that they pry her off him and replace that torn wrist with a fresh, intact one. She savages that one too, and the next, and slowly, so slowly, the welts in her skin start to fade and close. Her breathing gets easier, slightly, but the impalement wound in her chest remains, and she clutches at it with one hand.

Red eyes turn to him, almost beseeching; the available crewmen are tapped out, she’s taken all she can from them without killing them, and he needs them to fly the ship. “Please,” she hisses, a pitiful sight below him, and his fingers clench reflexively. “Your debt to me grows,” he replies bitterly, but pulls off his glove and shoves up his sleeve regardless.

He kneels next to her, offering his forearm with a look of disgust, and she bites down with little preamble. He watches her swallow down his blood, hating the feeling of it; but this is no pleasure feeding, she’s not even taking the time to enjoy it, just sucking down as much as she can to fuel herself. After a few minutes he pulls back, tugging at his arm, and she releases him reluctantly, drawing in thick gulps of air. 

He bandages his wounded forearm, looking at her with revulsion, and she simply lays there, eyes closed on the floor of the ship. He curls his lip and steps over her, finding somewhere private in the small transport to rest. 

Later, back in his secure private chambers, she crawls into his bed and sleeps next to him, and he’s too worn out and fed up to bother dislodging her. She leaves small bloody smears on the sheets, but most of her wounds have started to close, for the most part. She steals his warmth, and, thankfully, nothing else, laying her head at the level of his chest and lying still. He blinks at her blearily, annoyance making him scowls slightly, but beyond that he doesn’t react. She’s not worth the effort.


	4. Chapter 4

It’s lockdown, and she splits the corpse open with practiced ease, slicing it vertically with a shard of metal and cracking the ribcage apart like a butcher. The sound makes his stomach heave and he squeezes his eyes shut, pressing the back of his hand to his mouth, trying to use the thick latex smell to overwhelm the reek of blood and raw meat. She tisks and goes for the liver first, dragging out thick intestines and tossing them far away; she’s careful with these, at least, lest they tear open and spill offal everywhere. The stomach goes with them, leaking bile. She extracts the liver and holds it over her open mouth, squeezing it like a sponge. “God, this is so inefficient,” she grumbles, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “The hell do I have to do to get a good set of tubs and some butcher’s hooks around here.”

At the other end of the room, Alad’s trying not to vomit. He’s trying really, really hard not to lose everything he’s eaten today, trying to ignore the reek of entrails and the terrifying casualness with which she dismembers the dead crewman, trying not to think of how easily she could do that to _him_ , trying— 

He is sick with fear and revulsion, and she is not so distracted that she cannot recognize the signs of easy psychological prey. She tosses organs in his direction, slurps much louder than is necessary, and makes a show worthy of at least three Oscars digging out the crewman’s heart and gazing at it with undisguised lust. She grins ear to fucking ear when she’s rewarded with the sounds of him retching miserably into a bucket, huddled in a corner with the pail between his knees. She watches him sidelong, cackling, and he gives a watery glare, interrupted by the need to heave again, his shoulders shaking. 

She bites into the heart with slow enjoyment, squeezing it in her hand so the juices run into her mouth and down her chin. She hums with pleasure, savoring the taste, the texture… no matter where, no matter who, this is always a constant. This feeling, these sensations, it’s the same, and it comforts her. This violence, and the feeling it gives her, it’s home. It’s home when nothing else is here, in this void of unfamiliar things. Everything she knew is gone, everything but this…

She spasms, yowling as a shock tears through her, making her jerk back on her ass, twitching. Alad’s glaring daggers, one hand on the controls for her collar, and she hisses at him, a wet, rattling sound. The heart’s gone pulpy and crushed in her hand, from a reflexive clenching of limbs, and she snarls in anger, leaping for him.

She’s brought down again with another series of shocks, screeching in pain and frustration, and then left still and slightly smoking, glaring furiously at him from the floor. He’s still huddled against the wall, wiping bile from his mouth, and she makes no move to attack further. It’s silent for a while, both of them glaring their anger at each other, the acrid smell of vomit permeating the room and mixing with the meaty, raw smell of the corpse. 

She slowly turns back to the body, grinding her teeth, and, still seething with spite, he seizes the puke bucket and flings it at the corpse, sending watery green sick spilling over the open chest cavity. She shrieks and recoils, skittering back from the stinking mess. “You blistering asshole, I was going to _eat that!_ ”

He curls his lip in vindictive pleasure. “S-serves you right.”

They stay on opposite ends of the room after that, glaring daggers at each other until the lockdown ends, the Infestation cleared from their section of the gas cloud city.

 

——————————————————————————————————————————

 

He finds her curled in a corner of his lab, clutching her own skinny shoulders and trying very hard not to make any sound. He frowns slightly and attempts to ignore her, but her dark curled form weighs on him for some reason not adequately explained. She’s not _watching_ him like she sometimes does, like she could kill him just by sustained glaring (and she can’t, right? he’s pretty sure she can’t), her back’s turned and she hasn’t spoken, but he just can’t— not notice. She’s never done this before and he doesn’t know what to make of it, and he’s got a terrible track record with stubborn puzzles to begin with. So he stumps over, sets his face in a displeased scowl, and— oh.

He does not like that expression. 

She’s got her brow furrowed into an unhappy knot, shoulders hunched up around the collar, and she acknowledges him with a flick of her eyes and the slightest exhale of breath. 

She’s not…. aggressive, at least. No snarl, no threat to lunge, hardly any reaction at all. But his uneasiness stays, and this only confuses him more. She doesn’t do unhappy; she does angry, and sullen, and sadistic, but not flat unhappiness. He nudges her back with his boot. She doesn’t move. 

He frowns, annoyed. He would go back to his work, he _should_ go back to his work, but this irritates him. What does she think she’s doing, sulking with such an inexplicable expression, and no explanation to be had from her! It can’t be anything _he’s_ done, no. Not because he couldn’t possibly have done anything to warrant it, but because she’s never shown anything but anger to his antagonism. She’s too proud for open suffering, he thinks. Can’t let him see her like that, not in response to his actions. 

(Though not proud enough to keep from putting her… unpleasant desires on display, oh no.)

He crouches down to get a better look and her eye swivels to him again, tired and flat. She’s facing away from him still, and he can hardly see her face, so he turns and sits himself down against the wall, watching her. He sees her nostrils flare, watching him right back, and he blinks slowly, expectantly. After a moment her lip curls slightly, the line of her side ripples, she moves—

He jerks, startled, as she _crawls into his lap_ , nosing at his middle and laying her torso across his legs. He tries to skitter back, already pressed to the wall, and stares in confusion. She’s not… doing anything, exactly. Just curling around his middle, fitting her head and one arm under his coat, nosing against the softness of his clothed stomach in a way that makes him stiffen warily. He clamps down on his fear though, smothering it with exasperated irritation — the hell is she _doing_ , no explanation, no words, he can’t tell what she _wants from him_ —

(Heat, radiating warmth, the sick, fevered pulse of life, too hot too loud too _delicious_ ; she wants it against her skin, if nothing else, wants to feel it, let the warmth seep into her, remind her that living things do still exist, that not everything familiar is gone.)

She ends up wrapped around his abdomen, knees curled up on one side, nose pressed against his undershirt with one arm wrapped around the side with her legs. He’s got one hand on her collar controls and the other on her back, stroking softly. He can feel her ribs under his glove. 

This is….weird. It’s weird. He does’t know what to do and she’s _touching him_ but not… not aggressively? She’s not even doing anything, just, just lying there, holding his middle. There’s not much he can do like this, and he’s half terrified she’s going to twitch her jaws open and eviscerate him right there, but… she doesn’t.

She just stays like that for almost half an hour, curled up to him and soaking up his heat, his scent. And then, like an invisible egg timer had gone off, she just gets up and leaves. He sits there in her wake, with a head full of question marks and no words to express them. 

 

——————————————————————————————————————————

 

She cups his jaw in both hands, feeling her way down his neck and shoulders, fingertips pressing into his chest at his heartbeat. Her hands are cool, warming to his flesh, and a little bit of the tension goes out of her spine. She touches him hungrily; she’s always hungry, for blood, for death, for heat, for contact. She is a true parasite in every sense of the word, he realizes, taking everything she needs to live from others. She could not survive, not physically and not psychologically, without humanity — without him. She soaks up the heat of his body, now, stealing warmth through her dead flesh, and he feels a level of disgust that is familiar by now, manageable. He allows this, allows her to map the sharp edges of his body with her hands. He feels… exposed, without his coat, his collar, but it is that feeling that makes his skin crawl slightly, rather than revulsion at her proximity and parasitical nature. This, he decides, is an experiment, an opportunity to study her more closely. 

“God you’re so _scrawny_ ,” she marvels, feeling his ribs under her fingers, a thin layer of soft fat between skin and bone. He scoffs, eyeing her own knife-sharp spine ridges, the thin swoops of her shoulderblades. “There is a metaphor about cooking implements that seems appropriate here.” She snorts and presses her fingertips into his sides, making him squirm. “Call me when you can lift your own weight and then some with one hand.”

Tentatively at first, then slowly gaining confidence, he explores her body as she does his, ghosting his bare hands over her back, her hips, her hollow stomach. Her flesh feels unsettling, yielding and soft like a living body, but cooled to slightly below room temperature, and too smooth to be natural. Unlike him, she seems perfectly at ease with her own near-nudity; he still keeps away from more suspect areas, though, out of his own deep-set discomfort if nothing else. 

She settles with her hands wrapped loosely around his neck, one ear pressed against his sallow chest, soothed by the sounds of his breathing and heartbeat, and feeling the pulse of blood through his carotid and jugular with her palms. He lies still, somewhat put off by the presence of her hands at his throat — he remembers all too clearly her strength and steely grip — but for now she seems content to simply lie there, so he endures. Even now she is stealing his life, he thinks, feeding off it through simple sensory observation. She is soft against him, weighing so little, and her skin has absorbed enough of his heat to almost trick his hindbrain into believing she’s alive — almost. Her body is unnaturally still and devoid of any semblance of a pulse. He doesn’t even think she’s breathing right now. 

Is she asleep? He cranes his head to get a look at her face, but the movement seems to jar her out of whatever trance she was in; she stirs and looks up at him, fingers on his neck twitching reflexively. They stare at each other for a long ten seconds before she inhales a long breath, like a reverse yawn, and stretches out the muscles in her legs. “Oh,” she says, tongue flicking over her lips. “Oh, I’m hungry.”

He blanches. “Oh no, not me, not again.” He quails under her hungry gaze, the usual intensity dulled by sleep. “We had a _deal_.” 

She draws herself up higher, stretched out over his thin chest and holding his stem of a neck in her hands. “Oh but _please_ , I’ll owe you,” she looks at him almost beseechingly, making sickening puppydog eyes. His lip curls involuntarily, trying to scrunch his chin down to cover his neck. She oozes closer, breath lukewarm and smelling faintly of rot, and tips his head back up slowly, easily overriding his struggles. She’s salivating, and his heart lurches in panic, breath catching in his throat. “No, no please, _don’t_ —” He tries to shove her off, to dislodge her, but she hardly seems to notice as she mouths at his windpipe, his jugular. He feels the prickle of her teeth against his skin and barely contains a whimper of fear; he is so bare, so vulnerable, his collar is precious feet away, out of arms reach, and without it he can’t call Zanuka, can’t even activate her restraints, how could he be so _stupid_ —

Her teeth puncture delicate skin with a wet pop and he cries out, jerking back in pain. She holds him almost tenderly, one hand keeping him from squirming away from her mouth, her other arm looped under his shoulder. The hand holding the other side of his neck slides up to stroke his cheek with her thumb, and he feels her drawing slow gulps from the wound. He is stiff and shaking from pain and fear, cursing her, cursing his own foolishness. 

When his head starts to go light and insubstantial he switches to pleading, begging her weakly to _stop, please, I don’t want to die_ , and slowly, excruciatingly slowly, it seems to him, she pulls back, lapping at the bite until the bleeding slows. She coils like a satisfied cat on top of him, practically vibrating with pleasure and radiating warmth, and he gasps weakly, vision gone fuzzy and indistinct. She grins languidly, stroking his face and saying something about plasma transfusions, and his eyes roll back, his body dragging him down into black unconsciousness. Vaguely, through the last bit of awareness he has, he feels her curling up on top of him, arms wrapped around his bony torso and one sharp hip jabbing into the unwelcome stiffness at his groin, and then he’s gone, pulled down into dreamless sleep.

When he wakes his head is throbbing dully and that… _thing_ is nowhere to be seen. He sits up slowly, and a pinch at the crook of his elbow makes him wince and look over; a plastic baggie of clear fluid is hooked onto one of the high bedposts, a tube snaking down and ending in a needle stuck into the vein in his arm. He feels cold, but not dead, and the label on the bag indicates some kind of blood plasma. He curls his lip, sneering. Of course she couldn’t be content to just let him die, of course she had to keep him in good condition to victimize again and again. He clenches his hands, hating her.

 

—————————————————————————————————————————

 

There’s a trail of dark, viscous blood leading into his labs. It stops in an irregular puddle under her curled, collapsed form, a ragged slash nearly bisecting her at the waist — lord knows how she even got this far from the docking bay, with half her insides spilling out around her. He wrinkles his nose at the sight; he’s still not accustomed to organs being displayed so… _violently_. It’s almost vulgar. 

She twitches at the sound of footsteps, cracking open an eye. He stops a few feet away, keeping clear of the sticky mess on the floor. They watch each other for a long moment, her lip curling.

“…help me.”

He raises an eyebrow, eyes hidden behind his visor. “What was that?”

She snarls weakly, claws scratching against the lacquered floor. “ _Help me_ you festering jackwad, this _hurts_.” He eyes her, watching the dim light of the gas clouds glisten off her darkened and twisted intestines. Hmm, light… He idly checks the time, calculating how long he’s got. Ten minutes, it seems. Plenty of time. 

She’s trying to haul herself up, dripping blood and shaking with the pain, another coil of intestine threatening to join the rest of the puddle. He activates the magnets in her collar and it slams her back down with a screech of pain, pinning her to the floor. She yowls and struggles weakly, making pained little noises as the jagged slice in her middle is pulled and pinched by her motions. He’s watching her with clear interest, and she hisses, eyes flashing at him. “The fuck are you doing, this isn’t helping.”

He smirks and sets his visor to record what he sees, so he can examine it later — purely for science, of course. “This seems an apt time for a little, heh, experiment.” He walks slowly around her, making her arch painfully to keep him in her line of sight. “You have only experienced sunlight through Earth’s atmosphere, correct? No data on other planetary bodies?” 

Her eyes are blown wide and her entire body stiffens. “…no… no, you can’t, don’t you fucking DARE!” She howls, clawing at the collar holding her down, until the magnets in her wrist cuffs activate and pin her arms as well. The sky outside lightens slowly, the colors warped by the gas clouds and Jupiter’s atmosphere. “I’ll fry, do you hear me, I’ll burn to ash and then where will you be, huh, fucking defenseless and not even a corpse left to study, _do not do this_.” She’s panicking now, Alad seeming completely unconcerned. “If there is risk of fatal injury I will terminate the experiment.” The corner of his mouth twitches up. “I want to see what will happen.”

The sun creeps over the clouds and her skin starts to redden as the light in the room strengthens. She squeezes her eyes shut, stiff as, well, a corpse. The light brightens further, flooding the room, and she screams, flesh smoking and crisping. Her ropey intestines sizzle and blacken and she howls in pain, the edges of the terrible wound curling like bacon. The smell is vile. 

She thrashes wildly, held fast at the neck and wrists, kicking her legs in spasms. She tries to curl over, protect her innards with the rest of her body, and sobs at the ripping, searing agony. Licks of flame start flickering over her skin and she writhes, keening high and broken. “Stop! Stop, Alad, _please_!”

He smiles, savoring the thrill that sound gives him; enough of letting her take what she pleases, enough of being her _victim_. He will teach her obedience or he will kill her in the process.

Finally, after her pleading had devolved again into wordless screams, he lowers the blast shades over the sun-facing windows, casting a thick, cool shade over her. She quiets, the fires in her skin dying out and leaving her smoking, scorched red and burned. He steps closer in steady, measured steps. She whimpers quietly, twitching in her pool of flash-dried blood and charred viscera. He looks down at her and releases the magnets in her restraints; she simply quivers, hardly seeming to notice. 

He turns to go, hands clasped behind his back. “Do not forget this.”

She presses her teeth together, shaking with the aftershocks of agony, and hates him.


	5. Chapter 5

He can tell when she’s been eating his crew, he’s starting to learn the signs. They get pale and sluggish for a few days, reluctant to take off their helmets or do any heavy lifting. He hears through incidental gossip and whispered anxieties of the web of blackmail and various vices that she’s managed to spread among them, enough to entice them to bare their veins. She’s got a surprisingly low kill rate among friendly forces, but in the few days after the sun experiment they start tripping over corpses left and right. He reasons that she’s sulking, hiding and healing and planning his murder, and he ponders how best to forestal that. He can’t wait for her to make the next move, he has to act first. Has to cement his… authority.

He starts drafting designs for a muzzle.

She's persuaded to open her jaws for the muzzle only with much threatening and waving of electric prods, and she sinks her teeth into it, seething with anger, the strap double-locked and too thick to tear through easily. It’s a ball gag, a fucking ball gag! She swears if she walks in to him holding a whip she is done, out of here, and damn whatever he does to her in retaliation. Fortunately there is no whip, and she clasps her hands behind her back to at least forestal him from thinking to use the magnets. His smile is oily and smug, and she curls her lip.

She watches him evenly, a hair shorter than he is, and he gloats visibly. “Isn’t this better? Me, talking, and you, not talking?” She narrows her eyes, a wisp of a growl muffled by the gag. He steps closer, almost to her face, and jerks his chin up, arrogantly. Her sinuses flood with his scent, and she bristles, jaw tightening. “But the best part…” he takes her chin in a gloved hand, eliciting another growl, “the best part is that you can not touch me.” 

Her hands clench, lips pulled back in an impotent snarl, and he laughs at her rage. “You can not and you will not, not ever again! I have learned things since our last… interaction, things that I find very much useful.” He moves to a low shelf and picks up a plastic tube, capped at one end with a flared disk of glass. She can see the bulbs inside, clustered like insect eggs. “Sunlight is not easy to replicate exactly, you know, but for a prototype this works rather well, yes.”

She’s started to chew, working her jaw slowly, putting pressure on the hard rubber ball in her mouth. It stinks, makes her wrinkle her nose at the acidic-rubber smell of it, but she chews into it, cutting grooves and slices into it, trying to… there. It starts splitting on its own, caving under the pressure, the acrid taste flooding her mouth further. His back is to her, talking incessantly, and she splits the ball entirely, shaking free of it and snapping her teeth together. He starts to turn his head.

She pounces, catching him half-turned and slamming him down, snarling like a revved motor. His head cracks against the floor and she rips the collar free of him, flinging it away, and he chokes on a scream. She bears down on him, teeth bared and glistening, and traps his arms under her knees, looming over him. Damn, damn, _damn_ , how does she always do this, how does she always get him helpless like this? He had _tried_ , this time, he closed her mouth off and everything! He struggles and kicks, eyes blown wide as she grins slowly.

“You know, it is damn irritating how fragile you are, you arrogant little rat.” He stops and gapes, halfway to indignant. “I mean, if I did all the things I wanted to do to you, you’d be dead before I was half done, and where’s the fun in that?” He shudders, already gasping for air and she leans in, breath fetid on his face. “So I’m going to try something else instead, something that won’t kill you. It won’t even be permanent!” She’s grinning wider, manic. “But it will hurt.”

She opens her mouth and, before he can even flinch, she's bit into her own wrist, savaging it. He gapes and lightning-quick she grabs his jaw and holds it open, pressing the wound to his mouth. He chokes and recoils in revulsion; the blood is thick and almost chilled, cool and vile on his tongue. He tries to spit, to turn his head, but she holds him fast, filling his mouth with dead blood. He has to swallow or choke, and his body choses swallow; his whole chest bucks in protest, cool viscous liquid trickling down. 

It burns, it burns and it tastes like death and rot and he wants to kill her, he does, but she’s an immovable force above him, his jailor as surely as he is hers. After an uncertain eternity she pulls back, lets him breathe raggedly, sucking down air. She laps at her torn wrist, the bleeding already slowed, edges starting to heal together, and gazes at him manically. 

“Red’s a good color on you.”

And then she’s gone, bounded off and out and away. The sudden absence of weight on his chest shocks him still, and then he rolls to one side and heaves; dry, his stomach’s clenched itself shut and he can’t persuade it to budge. He whimpers and scrapes at his mouth with the back of his hand, shoulders hunched. He feels sick, the clotted taste sticking to his tongue, his teeth, and he scrambles up unsteadily, making a beeline for water. He rinses his mouth a dozen times over, scrubs his teeth and tongue, and tries again to bring up what she fed him. No luck, and he’s left woozy and exhausted, seeking his bed. He quickly retrieves his collar from the floor, making a pained sound at the scratches and dents from her manhandling of it. He posts hasty guards over his chambers and labs, confirms with her tracker that she’s far, far away, and promptly passes out sideways on the bed. 

He wakes to nausea, very sore shoulders, and a hunger that feels like his stomach’s caving in. He groans and rises slowly, making for his personal kitchens, but has to stop and lean against the wall for support, chest feeling tight. Something smells good, though, so the cooks must already have something for him. He tries to moisten his dry mouth and staggers on. 

There’s no sounds of movement from the kitchens or dining area, but the smell is too good to ignore, and he peeks through to the kitchens, walking slowly into the room. His eyes are gritty from sleep and he kneads at them, and its only when he lifts his head again that the shape on the counter resolves itself into a dead dog. 

He stares at it, taking in the shape of it, its bristled, wiry hide, its teeth bared in a rictus snarl, its throat torn out and dripping slowly into a mixing bowl. He walks forward, mechanically, part of him wondering how the hell she got a kubrow here, the other part only just making the connection that this… thing, this is the source of that smell… He blanches, recoils, the aching in his stomach doubling up on itself. Each drop of blood falling into the bowl makes a tangible sound, seeming to consume all other noise. The sharp hunger in his gut drives him forward, drawn by that smell, and he realizes as his fingers touch the rim of the bowl that _she did this_. She had to have done, her blood, she knew this would happen. His hands are trembling, the red inside the bowl glinting at him, and he swallows heavily, knowing only that she did this and that he wants that redness dammit, wants it on his tongue and down his throat and he can’t _breathe_. 

It tastes like light, when he raises it to his lips, like light and life and fire, and he groans, eyes drifted closed. The bowl’s empty before he knows it, and he laps around the inside, still so desperately hungry. His eyes fall on the torn throat of the dog and his mouth opens slightly; his fingers touch the oily fur before he recoils sharply, stepping back with a sound of horror and disgust. He staggers back further, hands clamped over his mouth and nose, the taste on his tongue suddenly repugnant. He gags and sinks to his knees, shuddering. She did this to him, made him this way, oh god, made him… he hugs his shoulders, shaking with terror, mouth still stained red with kubrow blood. 

“Just so we’re clear, if I could have filmed that, I would have.”

He whirls, choking on a shriek, and she’s looming over him, hair hanging round her face and a sadistic grin showing too many teeth. He scrambles back as she laughs, his back hitting the wall. She swoops down at him, crouching, and grins. “Did you enjoy it?”

“…w-what did you… do to m-me…”

Her grin widens and she laughs again, nearly shrieking with glee. He makes a noise that sounds damn close to a snarl and grabs her by the throat, sudden strength squeezing her windpipe tight, and he roars, “WHAT DID YOU DO TO ME?”

She hisses low, eyes mere slits, but that smile stays. “Calm the fuck down, I haven’t turned you. Didn’t I say it wouldn’t be permanent?” 

He slowly releases her, the surge of energy gone from his limbs. She twists her neck from side to side, cracking it sharply. “There is a process you have to follow if you’re gonna turn someone, and I skipped the part where you die. You’ll be back to normal in a few days, no harm done.” She pats his cheek, mockingly. “The good news for you is that I can’t chomp on you till it’s out of your system. Can’t risk actually turning you, ya know.”

Against his better judgement, he stutters, “..w-why?”

Her lip curls into a grimace. “Because do you really think I want to spend eternity with you? Actual new vampires are like fucking children, no impulse control whatsoever and a damn sight stronger than you are now, and I am not in the mood to deal with that shit full time.” Then she flashes those teeth at him again, eyes glittering. “But for now… I get to watch you squirm, and agonize, and feel every bit of what I go through, and it will be so _satisfying_.” 

He swallows hard, a cold sweat making his skin clammy and damp, and the taste of the kubrow still so fresh in his mouth. “No. No, I… I won’t…” 

“Won’t what, drink human blood? Oh yes you will, there’s not a vampire alive that wouldn’t walk over hot coals for the stuff, and you won’t be the exception. Did you think that dog was all I had for you?” She presses a cool hand against his chest, his heart pounding against it. Her eyes lock onto his and hold them, trapped. “You’re still alive, but you’re also still hungry, and believe me, that hunger will break you.” 

She grabs his arm and yanks him up, dragging him out of his quarters and down several thankfully deserted halls. He’s too stunned and roiling with conflicting emotions to do much more than trail confusedly behind like a traumatized kite string, and its only when she yanks him into a narrow maintenance vent that he recognizes where they’re going.

The pile of pillows and blankets is still there, but shoved to one corner, out of the way of a large plastic sheet on top of which slumps an unconscious Grineer soldier, stripped of armor and weapons, his face slack. Alad is released and subsequently flattens himself against the wall, breath trapped in his throat. 

“No, no no no don’t—” but she’s already lifted the soldier’s arm and bit deep into it, and the smell that floods the tiny room is like a hook in his gut, dragging a high moan of revulsion and need from him. She grins slyly, mouth smeared red, as the wound drips agonizingly. “Come on, it’s fresh. He’s still alive here, I just fried his brain, so he’s not gonna be waking up any time soon.” 

He takes a shaking step forward and her eyes glint. “But first…” and he feels like he’s going to explode, desire and refusal and disgust and temptation all churning inside his head. She cackles at his expression, and then her gaze goes steely. “Take this collar off me.”

He blanches. “W-what? No, never, I—” but she squeezes the Grineer’s arm so that blood wells up and spills over, and his words peter out into high panting. “Nnng alright! I will! But just… after this, after I am… normal, again.” 

She considers, and nods, but holds up a hand. “If you go back on that promise, if you’ve lied to me, I swear I will change you for real, and you will live with this agony for all eternity, in darkness, with only me for company, do you hear me?” He nods, meekly, and falls to his knees, taking the proffered arm from her.

The sound he makes when he starts to drink is almost orgasmic, mouth pressed into the dripping wound. She watches him with undisguised glee, watching the way he shudders, holding onto the limb so tight that his short, blunt nails leave little half-moons in the Grineer’s skin. She smiles, licking her own lips and turning to the soldier’s throat; the wet crunch as she makes her own wound and starts to drink makes him hunch his back, some deep part of him raging with loathing and revulsion, but unable to do much more than shout impotently at the rest of him, with his teeth in the Grineer’s wrist. They’re too blunt to do much of anything, and he prays they stay that way, but the sensation of kneading flesh, oozing hot, rich blood onto his tongue, it’s too good to resist.

He retreats into this red haze, knowing only taste and sensation and pure animal pleasure, and when he comes out of it he’s curled into the nest of blankets, head resting on the monster’s soft stomach and a heavy sensation in his gut that is equal parts satisfying and sickening. He avoids looking behind him, at the corpse he knows is there, and instead covers his face in something approaching shame, feeling half-dried blood tacky around his mouth.

Some hours later he wakes again, groaning, but surprisingly clear-headed. He raises his head and sees she’s still asleep, face serene and porcelain-white; he eases upright, trying not to wake her, and makes a quick escape, making for his quarters. The hunger is less than it was before, now, merely a steady, light ache in his gut. He knows he can ignore it. Carelessly, he passes through a wash of sunlight from the glass-paneled walls and his vision goes white, pain searing through. He yells and stumbles back, out of the light, clutching his streaming eyes. He stays still till his vision clears enough to see, blinking the spots out, and curses vehemently, hurrying away from the windows. He frantically checks his skin for burns, remembering what had happened to her in ten minutes’ exposure, but his skin seems unmarred, only his eyes still painfully sensitive, and still seeing hazy spots. He grumbles, kneading his eyes, and hurries back to his quarters, thankfully without further incident.

Once safely locked in he scrubs his face and mouth again, bracing himself against the sink rim and shaking. He looks at himself in the mirror, skin reddened from washing and eyes bloodshot from sun, and whimpers.

He staggers back to his bed, exchanging his blood-spattered clothes for clean ones and shutting the window covers tight, and then sinks down into softness. He knows he has projects to work on, knows every minute he spends idle is credits wasted, but he just… can’t work right now, not with this coiling ache in his gut, not with this… desire in him. A soft clicking trill sounds, and Zanuka’s head pops up over the edge of the bed, peering at him. His expression softens and he moves back a bit, making room for her to jump up and curl next to him. He strokes her head softly, feeling cool metal and soft sheets, and closes his eyes. 

He’s woken yet again, this time by Zanuka growling mechanically, and by movement on his other side. He half-rolls over, hazy with sleep, and sees the monster creeping onto his bed. He yelps and wriggles back, coming up against Zanuka, who snarls another warning at her. She snorts at the robot, derisive. “Calm down, I’m not gonna do anything to him.” Alad narrows his eyes at her. “What do you want now, haven’t you done enough here?”

She rolls her eyes, settling cross-legged. “Didn’t I just say I wasn’t gonna do anything? You need to listen better, damn.” He scowls, pulling the blankets up to his chin. She huffs. “I’m cold, alright, and I can’t move that corpse yet. ….and I wanted to see how you’re handling it.”

She scowls as the shadow of a smirk forms on his face. “It’s not like I’ve seen this happen very often, it’s important to study how a human body reacts to large quantities of ingested blood, and it’s not like I can take you apart to find out.”

He’s silent for a moment, and she takes the opportunity to burrow under the blankets, seeking the place where his body heat had warmed them. He sputters, Zanuka rising to a growl again, but she merely hunkers down and snorts in blatant unconcern. He watches the lump she makes in the blankets warily, then, seeing no movement or signs of malice, settles back in as well. 

His traitorous stomach clenches in sudden hunger, and he doubles over on his side, inhaling sharply. She lifts her head, slightly, scarlet eyes bright on him, and Zanuka clicks softly, nudging him with her head in primitive concern. He holds onto his stomach, wincing at the sharp hollowness, and she smirks slightly. “You’ll need more, it’s not over yet.”

He blanches and grabs her shirt, panic on his face. “No more! No more, I can’t, I…” He’s shaking, hands fisted in her shirt, and bows his head. Killing he can do, killing has always been just part of his studies, hardly anything to get worked up about. But cannibalism… that, he cannot stomach. It is vile to him, abhorrent and disgusting and it _hurts so much_ , this need, this hunger, and more than that, this weakness. More than ever he hates her, hates what she’s done to him, hates how impossible it was to resist. His mouth twists in self-loathing. “Please, no more…” 

She looks down at him, blinking slowly, and lays a hand on his back. His breathing is uncomfortably close to sobs, and it sours her expression. “Fine, but I can’t promise the alternative will be any better. That hunger won’t go away until my blood’s burned itself out in you, and that could be days.” He whimpers and seems to curl in on himself, and she sighs, pulling his warmth closer. “I know…”

He hiccups and blinks. “You kn— oh…” It clicks, then, that this is what it’s like _all the time_ for her, this driving need and emptiness. He thinks back to all the times she’s fed from him and is suddenly, immensely relieved that he’s still alive; the willpower that must have took… He presses his forehead to her shoulder, swallowing heavily. “…how… uh…”

“How do I keep from killing everyone I see?”

He nods, mutely. 

“Age, practice, that sort of thing. It’s worst when you’re freshly turned, it hits you like a sledgehammer to the face every time, but you get used to it after a while. Some never get the hang of it and go on rampages till they’re put down.” She pats his cheek, patronizing. “You’re not strong enough for rampages, still fundamentally human.”

He digests this, and realizes abruptly that they’re pressed together in a way that seems more than a little suspect. He pulls back, releasing her shirt, but she keeps her grip on him. “Stop that, you’re warm.”

He sputters a bit, but capitulates, allowing himself to fold into her. He feels… well, not _safe_ , exactly, but at least a little more secure than last time. She had said she wouldn’t risk changing him permanently by feeding now, and she certainly _seemed_ sincere, and, even if she decided to go back on that, Zanuka was right there, ready to defend without his needing to summon her. 

He relaxes gradually, the ache in his gut subsiding slowly, becoming more manageable. She’s curled around him clumsily, eyes closed, and he lays his head down near her shoulder. They pass hours like this, dozing in the dim light, occasionally shifting position and getting tangled in the sheets. His dreams are wet and red, full of the taste of blood in his mouth and strength in his limbs and teeth at his throat, and a feeling of deep, paralyzing horror, but distant, as if belonging to someone else. At one point he’s woken by movement; she gets up and comes back an hour later, and the smell on her breath makes his stomach clench in need, but she holds his wrists to keep him there, and eventually the pangs subside. He rejects her offer of another dog, but another few hours later he recants through gritted teeth, clammy in a cold sweat.

The mug she brings him is steaming, and lends an illusory but comforting air of civility; he gulps it down fast, like medicine, as she watches his reaction. He can’t hide the relief it brings him, the lifting of that persistent hollow hunger, and the shivers of pleasure the taste itself causes. She curls around him as he hides his face, languid and crooning about how good she knows it is. “See that’s the flip side, isn’t it, that it’s _so damn good_ ,” and he can tell she’s grinning like a shark, even behind him, one hand curled around his shoulder like a pale spider. “Better than sex, sometimes.” He’s ruefully inclined to agree. 

He sleeps damn soundly after that, and when he wakes again she’s gone, and the ache in his stomach is, he thinks — he hopes — ordinary hunger. Cautiously, he creeps towards the kitchens, and this time there are no dead animals dripping fluids on the counter. A cursory inspection of the refrigerator reveals that the growling in his gut responds to ordinary human food, which he can only take as a good sign, and he makes himself an amateur pot of sweetened oat mash. It goes down agreeably, and a test peek out through the curtains confirms it; no unnatural burning in his eyes, no lust for blood. It’s over, he’s free. 

He opens the shades all the way and stands with his forehead against the glass for a long time, taking deep breaths of orange sunlight. He shudders at the memories, wet and red, but they’re already fading without the reinforcement of that… desire. After a time he turns, exchanges his sleeping clothes for his usual attire, and sets to work repairing the damage done to his collar.

 

————————————————————————————————————————

 

His hands are shaking slightly, and he clenches them and releases the tension after a moment to still them. She watches him carefully, chin held up so he can access her collar, release her from it, as per their deal. He swallows, feeling along the side of the thing for the keypad, and it lights up at his touch, the same texture as the rest of the thing. She’s perfectly still, perched on the side of his lab table with her hands in her lap, and he keys in the twelve-digit code, pressing his bare thumb against the ID pad to confirm.

It gives a cheerful beep and a slight pneumatic hiss, and pops open, and tension seeps out of her like steam; he hadn’t even noticed her shoulders were that tight. He does the same with each of her cuffs and she rolls her neck, cracking the stiffness out of it. He swallows, taking the opened cuffs and collar and laying them on the table, split open and useless, and brushes her cheek with the backs of his knuckles. The gesture is half residual claim of ownership, half plea for her not to eat him now that there’s nothing stopping her. 

She considers him, then licks his palm wetly and hops off the table and saunters away. He jerks back from her anticlimactic exit, skin crawling slightly from her tongue, and he doesn’t know what that response is supposed to mean

A day later he finds a dead Tenno on the floor in front of his chambers, the syandana it was wearing tied into a decorative bow around its neck.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And the nsfw starts.

He’s woozy, loose and warm from the liquor, and she’s managed to construct yet another nest of blankets and pillows, and the minute he puts the shot glass down she practically drags him into it, laughing at his ungainliness. She pats his soft, doughy face and grins cheekily, as he flushes from contact and booze. “Let that circulate for a bit and then I’ll have some.”

“Have so— oh.” She hadn’t had any of the liquor straight, probably couldn’t. “…must you?”

Her tongue flicks between her teeth. “You see anyone else in here?”

He doesn’t, and she stretches her limbs out languidly, grinning. “Been aaaaages since I’ve gotten properly sloshed, fuck knows I could use it.” He tries to answer, to protest that he’s certainly been under more stress than she has, but his tongue feels thick and slow in his mouth, and a hazy calm’s starting to spread from his stomach. Maybe this won't be so bad… if anything, the liquor would help numb the feeling…

Hah, no, _profit_ would numb the feeling.

He laughs at his own joke, warm and hardly noticing when she starts nibbling at his ungloved fingers, tasting the skin. He flinches when she pinches the pad of one finger in her teeth and tastes the bead of blood that wells up. “Yeah, you’re ripe.”

He protests vaguely, brow furrowing, but she noses under his chin and pats his cheek. “Shush, try to enjoy this one. I know I will.”

He sputters, but she licks a slow stripe up the side of his neck and the chill it sends through him makes his protests die in his throat. She holds his face with one hand, mouthing his jugular, and he swallows hard and lets the quiet hum in his brain distract him, holding himself still. When she bites down it’s pressure first, then sharp pain, but even that seems distant, detached from him, and he stays still and just breathes. She purrs against him, drawing from the wound slowly, savoring the taste; her thumb strokes the puffy skin under his eye and he finds himself turning his head into her hand, feeling her flesh warm. After a minute she pulls back, lapping at the bite mark until it stops bleeding and smacking her lips. “Ohh yes, that’s the good stuff.”

He’s woozy, but he suspects its more the liquor than anything, and he looks at her sardonically. “Having fun?”

She grins, lazy and pink-cheeked. “Oh you know it was good for you too,” and when he curls his lip she cackles. “That tent you’re pitching says so.”

He goes even redder, burning, and jerks back in dull horror; the front of his pants doesn’t lie, the fabric bulging up. He sputters and objects with a tongue slurred by drink and blood loss, but she pats him quiet, giggling. “Oh shut _up_ , god, you never stop talking.”

She yawns hugely, eyes half-lidded and laking their usual dread intensity, and maneuvers him closer, draping herself half over him like an overly affectionate cat. “Happens more often than you’d think, something in our saliva makes peoples’ happy bits wake up and say hello.” She laughs, teeth stained slightly pink. “That and some people are just masochists.” 

She settles herself completely as he digests this, resting her sharp nose into his cheek, that inhuman purr still resonating faintly in her hollow chest. He elects not to comment, due to the nature of the remark being so vastly below him, and not at all because if he opened his mouth he’d say something he’d most certainly regret. No, definitely not. 

So instead he says “I want to take you apart,” and regrets it slightly less than if he had said what the booze wanted him to say. 

She cackles like a storybook witch, flagrantly unconcerned at his voiced desire to disembowel her. “’n what will you give me if I let you?”

He gapes at this, mind going in drink-addled circles, while she laughs and laughs, finally sneezing herself quiet, hiccuping slightly. He shifts slightly, freeing one arm and tapping his fingers on her collarbone. “I want… to see,” he continues, because he’s a idiot, “what your… condition, y-yes, does to your organ systems, your… viscera.”

That damned grin is still in place, loose and directionless. “Oh man, you picked a good time to get all candid, I’m halfway willing to grant that creepy wish.” She lolls her tongue out of her mouth, kneading the topmost blanket with her toes. “I’ll think of what I want in return later.”

She keeps cuddling him, rubbing his face with hers in a way his addled mind can only think of as _nuzzling_ , and occasionally giggling aimlessly at nothing. He lies there, struggling to process a coherent thought, and absurdly calm about the whole affair. 

“You’re, ah… very affectionate right now.” 

She purrs again, low in her chest. (How does she even _make_ that sound? He makes a tenuous mental note to find out, if and when he gets to open her up.) “You’re damn cute, have I not told you that? Adorable when you’re scared, you get all sputtery and pale, it’s precious.” He frowns, opening his mouth to protest, but she ducks down and lets him feel the points of her teeth against his windpipe, and he freezes up, mouth left open and empty of air. After a moment she licks his chin and lifts her head again, laughing. “See? Adorable.” 

She’s got them practically nose-to-nose here, half propped over him with her hips resting on one side. Her breath still smells of blood, but in his inebriated state it seems like nothing can phase him. The corner of his mouth twitches up. “I say my collar apparatus is the best look I’ve seen on you, it was quite fetching… pity you were so, hm, insistent on having it removed.” 

She gapes in mock — is it mock? — indignation. “You’re a creep too, then.” 

“Says the creature who just took a good pint of my blood.”

“That was a fuckin’ quart and you know it, you’re a lightweight.” 

She shoves him playfully and, on impulse, he shoves her back, and then that devolves into a sloppy slapfight, her giggling shrieks bouncing off the walls. He’s just conceptualizing that even though she _could_ take his head off like this, she _won’t_ , this is harmless, when she stops, suddenly frowning. He pauses, confused, and there is something like pain on her face; she curls her lip and hunches down, curling herself back on top of him, her head resting on his chest. He blinks at her, thrown off by this sudden change. 

“…are you ill?” he asks; maybe the liquor is disagreeing with her. 

Her voice is quiet, almost sober. “…you don’t know how much I miss it. The way my life used to be.” Her breath hitches, fingers tangled in the fabric of his shirt. He lays a hand on her back, at a loss. “What… what was it like?” 

She huffs out a laugh at this. “I was born in eighteen… eighteen thirty something, I think. Prussia wasn’t a good place to be, then, so we migrated back and forth between there and this manner house outside London. I was all set for a fashionable London season, set to hand-pick my husband from those clamoring idiots, but I got on the wrong end of a monster and ended up an even bigger monster myself.”

He understands maybe half of those words, the names mean nothing to him. Nevertheless, he keeps his mouth shut as she talks. “I stayed with the hive for a while after that, the one who turned me had a decent lordship title and a house full of misfits. After a hundred years of that I traveled, got into some wars, freelanced as a mercenary doctor for a while, and landed in New York rooming with a werewolf. And that… that was good. We were good.” 

Her face is screwed up now, eyes tight with memory. “I liked that…”

He strokes her back softly. “After that… nng, no, I don’t want to think about after that, I’m…” Her breath’s coming hard, now, and she’s making small, pained noises that make his cold heart lurch; he pulls her up, arms solid around her fragile-seeming frame. “It’s okay, you’re… you’re okay, yes…” and she laughs ruefully, resting her head on his shoulder. “Fuck you… fuck you for waking me, fuck you for… keeping me here…”

But she clings to him all the same, legs pulled up and over his waist, and he simply leans back and wonders at what his life has become. 

————————————————

The next morning he wakes blurry and discombobulated, disturbed by a brief flash of light and a shriek, then he’s plunged back into darkness again. He flails jerkily, confused and slurring, “-can’t see,” and she falls back onto the pile with him, groaning. “Me neither you twit, too bright…”

“’s not bright..” and he fumbles on the lights on his visor, and she howls.

“Cruelty! Abuse! Inhumane treatment! Oh I’m going to die, I’m going to die and it’ll be all your fault!” Her volume and pitch stabs at his already pounding brain and he recoils, slapping the light off again to quiet her. “Alright, alright, just… stop that damned noise…”

She whines and rolls over, burying her head in the blankets, and he sprawls back, staring up into black nothingness. His mouth tastes like death and his head feels like someone’s pounding at it with a mallet in a sock. “Lets never do that again,” comes muffled from her general direction, and he grunts in agreement and pulls a pillow over his face.

 

—————————————————————————————————————————

 

She sighs, stretched out on his bed and melancholy. 

“You ever feel the weight of your own body?”

_Yes_. He scowls. “No.”

“A dead body is heavier than a living one, you know.” He knows. “I can feel the gravity, the air doesn’t want me to move. This body, this— hah, _cumbersome and heavy body_ ,” she spouts out, sing-song. He bustles around, radiating annoyance. 

“Come on, Alad, gimme warmth if nothing else. C’mere, not gonna bite now.”

He is mildly untrusting but weary nonetheless, and sinks in beside her with token objections. She purrs and drapes herself across him, soaking in his heat, and he relaxes too quickly with her pressed so close. He’s getting used to this, and the thought nags at the back of his mind that such complacency is dangerous, but he cannot bring himself to be alarmed just now. He’s too tired for that, and she soothes the fever in his skin. His work’s been at dead ends for weeks now, everything is too hot, deadlines too close, he needs, he needs—

Her coolness bleeds into him, drawing out the itchy heat. She nuzzles the back of his neck, making him flinch, but she keeps to her word and merely purrs at the warmth of him. She wants that, fine. She can have it.

Body heat, at least, regenerates fast enough to never be a problem.

 

—————————————————————————————————————————

 

“Take me to Earth,” she says, and so he does. He orders the transport and constructs a simple cuff for her to wear, communicator and tracker in one, so he can find her again. If she wants to come back. If not he supposes she’ll worm her way out of it and crush it. Or chuck it in a river. He tells her honestly that it’s got no magnets or shock batteries, nothing that could harm her. He doesn’t tell her about the automatic recording function, that keeps track of her surroundings and movements through 3D imaging. He doesn’t know why he omits that; he doesn’t even know why he put it in… and he doesn’t want to think about it. It makes him too confused, a puzzle about himself he can’t solve, it makes him uncomfortable. 

She takes it warily, not completely trusting him, but slips it onto her wrist regardless. “If I’ve lied you can… I don’t know, get a free bite.” She smirks at this, almost laughing. “I was going to anyway, but you know, it’s almost nice to have permission.” He grimaces, regretting it, and she’s gone. The transport taking her is small and sneaky, to get in and out of Grineer space quickly. He wonders what she’ll do on Earth. Suppose he’ll find out soon enough anyway.

He puts off looking for a day or so, busying himself catching up on his deplorable backlog (the hours wasted, the _credits_ wasted). When he finally allows himself to see what she’s been doing he doesn’t quite know what he expected; she’s running half wild, tearing through Grineer camps and cackling giddily. Skipping through the video logs he sees her exploring the endless forests blanketing the planet, clambering up trees and snatching at passing wildlife, what little of it there is. This must be…. odd, for her, Earth being home, but now not home. 

And it’s true, she thinks, toes digging into loamy soil, this place isn’t what she’d thought it’d be. She’d expected ruins, at least, signs of where things used to be. But — she scowls and kicks a rock, petulantly — there’s nothing here! Nothing but giant ass trees and lumpy clone people and mangy bat-faced dogs. Whatever’s left of what used to be here’s probably buried under layers of dirt and stone and tree roots. She sulks, sitting down on a mossy root rise and hunching her shoulders. The air smells like dirt and rust and some acrid scent she can’t place. The dogs at least give her a wide berth, knowing an apex predator when they smell one; mostly, she leaves them alone.

She slaughters more Grineer camps for consolation, glutting herself on cloned blood, and slithers inside nooks and hollows in the giant mutant trees to sleep the days away. He watches this intermittently, glancing at the feed in between projects and meetings and coordinating his business. She runs, and she kills, and she lives like a damn wild woman. The tracker cuff stays resolutely on, if only because she seems to have forgotten about it. She fiddles with it absently, sometimes, as if she doesn’t realize she’s doing it, tapping her claws on the metal and spinning it around her thin wrist. 

Some time later he absently flicks back to the feed, eyes sore from peering into Zanuka’s robotic innards, and sees her lying face up on a huge, damp tree branch, nearly horizontal under a clear sky, cancerous with stars. She’s moving, slightly, in place, one leg dangling off the branch, the other bent at the knee with the sole of her foot flat on the bark. She’s lost her shirt somewhere in the past week, and one hand’s down at the level of her waist and— oh. Oh that’s what she’s doing. 

He flushes hot and red, embarrassed, and makes to turn the feed off again, but a high, breathy sound makes him pause. She’s making a sound halfway between a purr and a croon, rocking her hips slightly and… and this could be useful, couldn’t it? As… blackmail, or a bribe, or… something. He feels heat in his gut as she pants softly, fingers slick and stroking. He sits down heavily, watching through his visor as she arches and gasps, teeth worrying his lower lip. Her motions get faster, more urgent, letting out little moans, and he swallows, breathing a little faster. 

“Ah, fuck— yes…”

She arches and jerks, head thrown back, and he feels a sharp throb in his groin at the sound she makes; a low, breathy moan. Then she slumps back flat and relaxes, slowly. She pulls a sticky hand from between her legs, purring contentedly, and he’s acutely aware of the pressure between his own, the heat in his blood…

She’s clambering down the tree to the river below and he hurriedly switches off the feed, his breathing suddenly very loud. He swallows heavily and closes his eyes, shame and arousal heating his face. No way around it; he undoes the front of his coat and works a hand down into his pants, activating the chamber lock with his other hand. Just… to get it over with, he tells himself, so he can move on with other things. Can’t let anyone see him so… overcome.

The first stroke makes him gasp softly, sensation pleasingly clear. It had been a while, after all, he’d been… otherwise occupied. He is soon slick in his hand from his own fluids, flushed hot to the tips of his ears, panting. He almost regrets having her free from her bonds now, this would have been… interesting, yes, had she still been under his control… He groans at the thought, remembering her flat on her back and raging, newly collared… and then later, muzzled and complacent, before the… incident with her blood. 

His strokes get firmer, imagining another muzzle like that, something to keep her teeth out of the way, but leave her mouth open… He rubs his thumb to the sensitive head, imagining her tongue, her throat… the mental image of it sends a thrill coiling in his gut and a low moan snaking out his lips. He moistens them, filling his head with fantasies of power and control, sensation and heat building until, until— 

His release is swift and euphoric, and leaves him quivering in his chair, jerking with aftershocks. His mind is pleasantly blank, wiped clean by the rush of orgasm. The cooling stickiness at his groin brings him back to full alertness, makes him wrinkle his nose in disgust. He’ll have to change his pants, now…


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More gore and more smut.

Her voice screeches in through his headset, making him jump and yelp, clutching his ears. “Alad! Alad, transport, now!”

He shakes the ringing from his ears and patches in video feed and two-way audio. “What, what is it?” She’s careening through Earth’s forests at breakneck speed, and he can hear a crashing and a howling behind her. She laughs, nearly breathless. “I, hah, may have pissed off someone too big to swallow. I’ll fill you in later, just get me out of here!” 

“Is that _Vay Hek_? What did you _do?_ ”

“Later!” she howls as the half-mechanized monstrosity behind her roars about spies and Grineer dominion, and fires a handful of whip-fast rockets that burst against the trees around her. Alad leaps up and orders a cruiser to Earth space, zeroing in on the tracker’s location. Vay Hek wasn’t known for his subtleties, but with any luck she’s got the sense to evade him and lay low until the transport arrives. 

She returns not dead, slightly singed, and in a surprisingly good mood. “Alright!” she bounds into his lab, palms pressed together. “Never doing that again!”

He holds back a groan, turning from his latest batch of Infested subjects. “I should hope not, Vay Hek is not someone to engage lightly.” She saunters over and peers in at the pulsating flesh nodules behind their protective glass. “And you are too, hm, valuable to lose just yet.”

She looks up, eyes glittering. “Oh, is that sentiment I hear? Are you growing… attached?” He sneers and looks away. “Certainly not. You are merely a useful asset to have, and I have, hm, tests I still wish to run, yes.”

She grins, leaning against the glass. “Still wanna see my guts then? Frying them in the sun not enough?” 

His expression remains impassive. “I… yes, that is still something I want to try. I can promise the procedure would be for purely scientific reasons, nothing so, ah, crude as before. I can ensure minimal pain, if you would be so willing…”

She muses this, tapping her fingers against the glass behind her, and he busies himself sterilizing and stowing away his tools for dealing with the Technocyte samples.

“…give me a meal and a shower and then we can do that.”

—————————-

She’s strapped into a modified version of his Tenno restraining rig, shamelessly nude. He feels a little thrill at the sight of her bound again; two months ago this would not have been possible, and she must trust him immensely to allow herself at his mercy like this. He can think of a thousand ways he could do her real harm, here. Bands around her limbs and head hold her still, and she watches his movements sardonically. He attempts an injection of anesthetic, but all it seems to do is dull sensation, instead of eliminating it entirely and putting her under. She shrugs. “I wasn’t expecting much more than that, drugs have weird effects on us.”

Thus prepared, he makes the first incision, starting at the hollow of her collarbone and down to below her navel. She flinches and hisses slightly, blood beading up sluggishly, but she makes no objection as he peels back the meat of her stomach. She has so many scars already, what’s a few more. 

Her digestive tract is curiously altered, both her large and small intestines clocking in at much shorter and smaller than they should be, and her stomach by contrast is large and bloated; presumably for holding such large quantities of liquid as she usually ingests. He is at a loss to explain how she gets the requisite nutrients from a blood-only diet, and she simply passes it off as “some death magic thing, I dunno.” Her face is tight from pain, but she doesn’t stop him.

He confesses to himself that it is exhilarating, carving her up like this. The Maestro is in his element here, and she’s pinned down below him like some exotic butterfly, her secrets open before him. Her kidneys and liver seem to be in top condition, but her reproductive organs have all but atrophied into nothing; she laughs and asks him sarcastically if he thinks the dead can breed. 

He moves to her chest cavity next, peeling aside her flesh and small breasts to expose her ribcage. This he cracks open by cutting the bones straight through with a set of long-handled clippers, making her yell and flinch back; he lifts the severed rib lattice away as she spasms, eyes intent on her glistening innards.

Partly to placate her, and partly because he wants to see her insides react, he strips off his left glove and makes a small cut on the inside of his arm, watching her eyes follow him. She opens her mouth for the wound and sucks at it greedily, pained tremors giving way to halting sounds of enjoyment. He watches his own vital fluid travel in muscle twitches down her throat and into her stomach, which pulses slightly. He watches her heart, a small, grayish thing, throb to life and fill her system with stolen blood. He is rapt, watching this process, feeling stirrings in his own gut that have more than a little to do with her slimy insides, and her current restrained position. He swallows heavily, pulling his arm back from her mouth and binding the cut.

She laughs shallowly at his expression and makes a sorry attempt at rocking her hips at him. “You are such a creep.” He pokes her sharply in one lung in retaliation and she yowls plaintively. “Hey, I need those.” 

“No you don’t, you said you don’t need to breathe.”

“I need air if I wanna talk, genius, that—” and she’s left gaping and silent as he takes the stem of her windpipe just before it branches into her lungs in his fingers and squeezes it closed. He laughs at her infuriated expression, her diaphragm trying vainly to suck in air with the passage blocked. He releases it after a few minutes, watching the ribbed tissue spring back to its proper shape and weathering the deluge of insults she spews. He’s grinning, amused and intrigued. “At least I have a reliable way to get you quiet now,” and she hisses in indignation. “Oh don’t you dare.” 

He pats her cheek with a bloody hand and moves to examine her heart more closely. It’s small and withered, seeming almost leathery, and she flinches back when he moves to touch it. “Should I tell you a secret?” He looks up at her with interest and one side of her mouth twitches up. “Against my better judgement I think I will; a blow to the heart is one of the few things that’s almost guaranteed to kill me. Cut off my head and it’ll reattach, break my spine and it’ll heal, but put silver in my heart and that’ll put me down for good.”

He stares at her, almost overwhelmed with this information, and she smiles. “Secrets are powerful, I have just given you the knowledge to kill me, quicker than sunlight would. I am confident you’re not going to use it any time soon.” He nods slowly, tracing the shape of the organ with his fingertips, and not entirely sure he knows what she means by telling him such a thing. 

Next he lengthens the main incision up her throat, delicately pulling back thin flesh and setting it with clamps, exposing her windpipe and esophagus. He peers into her mouth at her teeth and tongue, trying to trace the roots of those fangs, but she nips and sucks at his fingers, making him flush slightly. He still wants to feel what it’s like, in there, and he’s already somewhat aroused, but he doesn’t trust her one bit not to do something horrible with those teeth, and besides, he can think of no position that wouldn’t result in both of them toppling over. He bites his lip and files that thought away for future… consideration, yes, and plucks at her vocal cords like violin strings.

He wishes he could take one of her eyes, to see how it’s adapted for night vision, but she flatly refuses to let him near them, and he capitulates. He takes slivers of flesh for further study, thin slices from her skin and organs, a few chips of bone and a scoop of marrow. Then he places the severed ends of her ribcage back where they go, setting them in place with tiny metal staples. The bone’ll heal and fuse, she says, and he can open her again to get the staples out once they have. He folds her skin back over her chest, her stomach, her throat, suturing it up in small, neat stitches. She watches him as best she can, watches his focus and the deftness of his fingers. 

When he’s done, when she’s all closed up again, lovely wet insides hidden away, he releases her, restraints snapping open. She sits up slowly, wincing, and stretches out her shoulders, making them pop. Gingerly, she swings her legs down and stands, stumbling forward; he moves to catch her and she slumps onto his shoulder, hissing in pain. She manages to get her feet under her and get her weight on them properly, but not before laughing at his look of horror once he realizes where his hand went, to support her properly. She bounces her breasts at him, still laughing. “Little titty isn’t gonna kill you.” He skitters back nonetheless, very aware of the renewed stiffness at his groin, and swallows. 

“You, ah, should not be… moving around so much, y-you’ll pull your stitches.”

She snorts and turns, rolling her hips in a way he swears was intentional sabotage, and makes for the side room where she stored her clothes. Once she’s out of sight he hurriedly moves to adjust himself, trying to hide it better, sweating with embarrassment and a vague sort of fear. A hand touches his back and he yelps, whirling around, and she’s there, dressed and smirking, and his back hits the examination rig. 

She moves up at him, grinning slyly, and leans in, nose to nose. “I knew it.” 

He swallows hard, pressing back away from her, but she leans in to match. “I can smell that, you know, and my vision’s not that bad either.” He whimpers as her hand presses down over his groin, her presence solid and menacing. “So… what are we going to do about it?”

His mouth flaps open and before he can stop himself he stutters, “y-your mouth,” and the look of gleeful “oh, really?” on her face almost makes his knees go out. She grins, showing every single one of her teeth. “Dangerous place to be putting your funbits, but… hah, why the hell not.” He gapes, off guard. “A-are you serious?” She licks a stripe along his jaw and cackles.

“Dead serious.” 

Then she drops to her knees, dragging his pants down with her, and he couldn’t run if he wanted to, he’s rooted to the spot. She mouths the bulging front of his undergarments, making his breath come in short, quick bursts. This is actually happening, this is— she’s—

She pulls his underwear to his knees and eyes the offending organ, then licks a stripe up it from root to tip and he keens. She mouths it from the side, slicking it with saliva, and strokes it with one hand, moving to nip the insides of his thighs. He shakes and flinches slightly, feeling her make a small bite over his femoral artery, still working his shaft with one hand. She laps at the wound, purring, then returns to her original focus, slurping at his head with a tongue dyed crimson. He covers his mouth with one hand, to muffle himself, though it doesn’t do much good when she finally, finally takes him all into her mouth, dragging a deep moan from his chest. 

Her mouth is tight and lukewarm, tongue rippling against sensitive nerve bundles, and he finds himself wondering if a proper meal of fresh blood would bring her temperature higher. She can take all of him at once, forgoing breath, and when she swallows he feels the tight clutch of muscles and makes the most undignified sound. He feels a light prickle of teeth and gasps, a whine edging up his throat. “P-please, be c-careful…” She huffs a laugh around him, laving his shaft with her tongue, and he tips his head back and moans. 

His hips start rocking of their own accord, thrusting shallowly in and out of her mouth, and she bobs her head to match, making him pant and keen. She slurps and sucks and swallows around him, working her throat when his breathing gets more frantic. It feels good, so good, his mind is empty of almost everything else.

“Oh, o-oh yes, oh yesss…” he keens as he comes, one hand threaded through her hair, trembling fit to come apart at the seams. As the quivers subside she moves her head back, flopping him out of her mouth, and grins like the cat that ate the canary. He just slides down, legs going out from under him, slumping against the table supports before her. She licks her lips, smug as anything, while he pants and feels the heat in his face.

“You… I… t-thank you…”

She sits back on her heels and cracks her neck, still grinning. “You owe me, big time.”

—————————————————————————————————————————

 

She’s in bed with him, again. 

She never uses her own space anymore, she’s all but abandoned the tight storage room she’d built her nest in months ago. Instead she huddles up in his quarters, sleeping in his bed regardless of if he’s there or not. He tries to get used to it, tries to accustom himself to the presence of another person when he sleeps, however erratically that may be. He has… moderate success.

“What would you do if you were like me?”

He bristles slightly, staring up into darkness. “Is that a threat? I thought you agreed—”

She snorts into his shoulder, the edge of her nose pressed into it. “No stupid, I’m bored. It’s hypothetical.”

“Can’t you just sleep?”

One arm snakes across his chest, draping over it. “Nope, now answer the question.”

He curls his lip, imagining it. “I’d walk into the sun.”

She huffs into his shoulder, scowling. “Come on, be serious.”

“I am. You think I’d want to live that way? I already know what the… hunger is like, thanks to you. I have no desire to endure it ever again.”

He can’t see her, but he’s sure she’s rolling her eyes. “I mean aside from that. Just imagine…” The arm over his chest moves up to cup his cheek. “You could live forever, unkillable! You know how strong I am, wouldn’t you want that?”

One of his hands clenches reflexively… he’s actually considering it. “Raw strength is… not all that valuable in my line of work. I would not trade my faculties for it, at any rate. Though immortality…” He trails off, brow furrowed. She watches him in the dark.

Before she can respond, however, he takes hold of her arm. “And what about you, hm? What would you do if you had your, heh, humanity restored?”

She snorts, palm on his cheek growing warm from his body heat. “Fuck that, I’m not giving this up.”

“You enjoy being a monster that much?”

She grins in the dark. “I really do. Call me a sadist—”

_I will._

“—but you have no idea how fucking fun it is to chew your way through an entire platoon limb by limb.”

He shudders delicately. “….and I never will.”

She shrugs, dropping her arm back over his chest. “Can’t say you’d make the best vampire, you’re too fussy. I had my fill watching you suffer with feeding, if it’s just that for a thousand more years it’d get old fast.”

Anxiety and indignation make him sarcastic. “Oh I’m so glad my torment entertained you, what a relief to know it was not in vain.”

 

—————————————————————————————————————————

 

He wakes slowly, pulled out of a heavy dream by warmth against his bare back and light pressure on his hip. A puff of warm air at the base of his neck makes him blink fully awake, wriggling and bewildered. She nuzzles his spine, making him crane his neck around to look, and grins lopsidedly. 

“Wet dream?”

He blinks, confused, but then she squeezes his hip and the feeling brings his attention to his groin; a heavy pulse of blood, unpleasant and embarrassing. He makes a face and turns to move away from her, holding onto the possibility of going back to sleep, but she snakes one arm around his middle, pressed up against his back. He groans in irritation and she nuzzles the back of his neck, one hand flat against his belly. “Come on, lemme take care of that for ya.”

His nose wrinkles. “What?”

Her lips graze the back of his neck, sending a shiver down his spine. “I know you’ll enjoy it. I won’t even charge a meal.”

His breath falters in his throat and she apparently takes his silence for confirmation, sliding her hand into his undergarments and grasping at his half-hard member. The small jolt of pleasure makes him gasp slightly and bow his head forward, shoulders drawing up. He could push her away, he thinks, could yell and shove her off if he wanted to and, and she’d get the message, right? She, she wouldn’t just…

His train of thought derails when she swipes her thumb over the head of his dick, tugging the foreskin down, and the electricity this sends over his skin makes him want more. She squeezes rhythmically, coaxing drops of lubricant from him and making him shiver and buck shallowly into her hand. His hands clench on the pillow under his head, entranced by the sensations but also afraid of them; it’s nothing like playing with himself, somehow more intense, even though it’s the same basic action, and it scares him how easily his control was taken from him. He can’t tell her to stop now if he wants to, his body has stolen his reason in its desire to reproduce. 

His teeth dig into his lower lip as she works him into a quivering froth, tracing the shell of his ear with her lips and darting small, nipping kisses at the corner of his jaw. Her other hand worms under his side, fitting her fingers in the spaces between his ribs, which stand out in his sallow sides. Pleasure creeps across his skin, making his legs jerk and twitch. 

But his pleasure’s reached a plateau; even while he gasps from the feeling he can sense that it’s not getting any more intense, it’s just… hovering. Slowly, gradually, he gets used to it, gets used to the way it sends energy up into his abdomen and makes his dick twitch in her hand. She’s still stroking him firmly, languidly, her hips pressed flush up against his ass, and he finds himself suddenly grateful she’s female and lacking in comparable anatomy. She must be aroused, must be enjoying this, and he doesn’t know if he could stand it if there were another erect penis pressing up against his backside, wanting, needing—

With a shudder, he wrenches himself away from that mental image and focuses on the present, on her hand on his dick and the heat roiling in his abdomen. This in itself is horrible, his pleasure just keeps ebbing and flowing, never rising high enough to break and end this, give him release. His breathing becomes strained, fingers clenching in the fabric of his pillow, and he bites back a pathetic whine; he needs this to _end_ dammit, if this goes on much longer he’ll go mad, lose himself entirely.

Frantically, he casts his mind back, groping for a fantasy, an image, something, anything to push him over the edge. His mind lands like a skipped stone on the night months back when they had indulged and spilled their inebriated thoughts to each other; the taste of the liquor and her weight cradled against him flash in his mind, but what stands out is the feeling when she bit him, the rising of his gorge and member both. He gasps at the memory, making her pull a real groan from him with a slow squeeze, and he trembles inside at what he has to do now.

“…B-bite me.”

“Ohh?” He can _feel_ her grin, feel her breath moist against his skin, and he squeezes his eyes shut. “You want my teeth in you, is that it?”

He shudders, throat tight and strangled. “P-please! Just d-do it, I need—”

He’s cut off in a sharp cry that drags itself from his chest like barbed wire, turning into a low, shaky moan; she’s bitten him hard, at the joint between neck and shoulder, and his orgasm rips through him mercilessly. He spills his seed into her hand, arching up and away from her teeth, but she draws thickly at the wound, waiting until his aftershocks have subsided to pull back, her own breath coming ragged.

She pulls her flesh from his, sticky with sweat, and he hears a muffled curse and the unpleasant sounds of her seeing to her own arousal. His dick softens quickly, back to its proper dormant state, and his breathing gradually slows, eyes half-open in the post-orgasm haze. The pain in his neck fades, and is surprisingly soothed further when she fastens her mouth back over the wound, suckling softly; he can feel her movements behind him, and after a few minutes she shudders in on herself, curling against his back with a stifled sound of release. 

It’s quiet, then. She shifts slightly, making herself comfortable, but then settles completely against his back and does not move again. He can feel the cool stickiness of his soiled underwear, and the rising need to go and clean himself, to erase the evidence of his shameful lapse, but he finds it hard to concentrate now. He licks his lips, moistening his dry mouth.

“You owe me.”

She huffs softly against his back, spent. “Fair enough.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And the Infested. If some of this looks familiar it's because I posted a snippet or two on tumblr a while back.

It hurt, it hurt it hurtithurt— _his arm._

His arm was _gone._

And — now — so were the voices. The whispers. The thoughts that weren’t his, couldn’t be his, that came from somewhere so much more ancient and malicious.

He swallows heavily, the fingers of his right hand clenched tight around the stump of his left. He had severed it at the elbow, taken a ceramic knife and just carved through flesh and the sinewy joint, before he could lose his nerve. And now it lay, twitching, before him; mottled and bulbous flesh, elongated fingers fused with his glove and the plates of his coat, pulsing softly in the dim light. 

Air hisses through his teeth in pain, face screwed up against the horror of it; he scrambles to stand, to get his feet under him, and the movement sends a fresh gush of blood out the ragged stump. His stomach heaves involuntarily and he staggers, regaining his balance after a minute. It’s okay, he tells himself, it’s, it’s okay, he can replace it, yes. His steps quicken away from the horrid thing, giddy now, and lightheaded from blood loss. He can build a new one, once back at his lab, it wouldn’t be hard; something durable, maybe… Warframe parts? Oh, yes, he’s wanted to try that before, and now’s an ideal opportunity for… growth. In the right direction, yes… a Mutalist Warframe.

He stops, slowly, the giddy light in his eyes fading. No… no it can’t be, he’d cut it out, got rid of it, _it was out of him._ The severed end of his arm throbs and he’s shaking now, mouth pressed shut; even as he swallows dryly he can taste the spores on his tongue, in his throat. He sinks to his knees, imagining he can feel their filthy tendrils in him, around his skull and in his spine and burrowing into his brain; maybe not imagining it, after all. 

He gasps and clutches his head with his one bloody hand, back bowed. “P-please, no…” 

The clusters of Infested growth oozing from the walls and floor seem to gravitate towards him, waving invitingly, and his wound pulses again, patches of mangled flesh glowing a soft, vile purple. 

_Yes…_

_You are… ours… us… forever._

 

——————————————————————————————————————————

 

She lashes out, hissing, and scores lines into his flesh, lines that are already closing up as he grabs her shoulders and laughs. “No good! No good, I’m… hah, better, like this.” His eyes are wide and bright and his smile is bordering on manic. She shows teeth in a frightful snarl and grabs his arm, wrenching him sideways in a flip, landing him hard on his back. “That’s debatable.” 

He laughs and lunges up, swiping with his mutated arm, and she dodges back easily, lip curling. “You think you can match me now? I’m old as balls, you think I’d have lasted this long if something like you could take me down?” Alad merely rushes her, air around him swarming with spores, and she rattles a hiss in her throat and meets him head on, slamming her shoulder into his chest and ramming him back to the wall. He screeches in pain, the Infested around them sending up a roar of outrage, and she grabs his throat and squeezes. 

“Look at you, it’s _growing in you._ You can’t beat me like this, you’re still too _weak_ ,” and he laughs through her stranglehold. “You forget… my army…”

The hissing and growls from behind them grow more numerous and fervent, and she looks over her shoulder at the growing mass. “Fan-fucking-tastic.” They rush her all at once and she drops him and leaps at them, a whirling blur of claws and teeth. 

She ducks under an Ancient’s sweeping strike and eviscerates the thing, shredding a few Chargers as she goes, but the shockwave from a Mutalist Moa — and damn them, who the hell gave him the idea to put this shit in _robots_ — knocks her flat on her back and the horde dogpiles her. Alad picks himself up, rubbing his throat, and cackles. “Cull the weakest! Only the toughest and most resilient of my creations can survive.”

She howls indignation and outrage, tearing through the horde of Infested, but they’re not completely outmatched now; she takes blows from all sides, sizzling with venom and corrosive fluid, and she gets slower by the minute, dragged down by pain and the sheer numbers against her. The wave is endless, each creature she cuts down falling to reveal two more to take its place, and he laughs with glee from the sidelines, watching this monster and his creations duel. 

She stumbles; that’s it. An Ancient Disruptor takes a lashing swing and she crashes into the wall, dazed and reeling, and he takes his opportunity to leap over her, looming with a shaky, diseased grin. “You see? They are stronger even than you, heh… _we_ are stronger…”

He crouches down, taking hold of her chin in one hand. “This flesh is a blessing, don’t you see,” and she makes a sound halfway between hissing and laughing. “Look at you,” she says again, “look at this… hah, would you believe this has happened before? Mutating diseases like this, they’re not as uncommon as people always think… Blacklight, in New York, oh, I remember that.”

She reaches up to stroke the blossoming growths on the left side of his face, and his posture relaxes slightly. “You could… join us, you know. Accept this, nng, gift.” Her face twists with amusement. “A Mutalist vampire, is that what you want?”

His hand moves down, over her heart. “Dead flesh would prove a challenge, yes, but I am, hah, confident enough in my abilities.” He leans down, back bent over her, and swallows. “You would be… glorious.”

She blinks slowly, breathing in the acrid tang of Infested flesh. “I already am.”

His smile widens, the crown of Infested growths round his head quivering. “Oh but not for long, no… the world is evolving, little bloodsucker, _we_ are evolving. There aren’t many of you left, yes, and what happens when we pass you by?” His eyes are glittering now, and she watches him, chest suddenly icy inside. He strokes her cheek, almost tenderly. “You’ll be left at the bottom of the food chain. _Again._ ” 

Her lips draw back from her teeth in a rattling hiss, jerking herself back from him. _“You don’t know that, you—”_ but he takes advantage of her startle, grabbing one arm and pressing the fingers of his mutated hand into the cuts and burns from the fight, scraping off cells into her open flesh. “You could, nng, rise, with us, become _perfect_.”

She flinches back and snarls, practically vibrating with anger. “Or…” She lunges at him, knocking him back with force and wrestling him down, against his flailing retaliations. “Or I could kill you right now and end this. You’re the lynchpin here, you go and all this is stopped.” He hisses up at her, one hand round her throat, and he can’t tell if her teeth show in a grin or a grimace. His heart thumps in fits and starts, suddenly very unsure of his chances. “No, you—”

She snarls and lunges for his throat, sinking her teeth in and making him scream, but she’s not more than a mouthful into his death when she chokes and recoils, leaping back from him and retching.

“God, what!”

She’s pawing at her mouth, dribbling his blood, and she makes an awful gagging sound, like a cat with a bellyful of grass. She heaves up colorless bile, streaked with red. He sits up jerkily, holding onto his torn neck with one hand, and watches her writhe; a laugh bubbles in his chest and bursts out his mouth, choppy and harsh. He laughs, eyes bulging wide, as she hisses at him, backing away on all fours. “You can’t hurt me! This blood, it rejects you! Hah!”

She spits vehemently, rage on her face. “Then I’ll kill you some other way!”

But the remaining horde behind him growls collectively, rippling forward as he stands. “This is, heh, inevitable.” He steps forward, mutated hand held out to her. “Why resist this?”

She stares at him, spilled blood all down her chin, and swallows, painfully. Then she turns and sprints away, out the nearest door, and she’s gone before he can react. He hisses through his teeth and sends Chargers in pursuit, though he doesn't expect them to bring back much; but this is good, he decides. She’s running scared, scared of _him_. That’s not something he ever expected to happen. He starts to relax, the ragged bite mark on his throat itching as it slowly heals itself. 

She races down twisted and buckled corridors blindly, something close to panic cold in her gut. One of the sliding doors ahead of her has jammed, half open, and she tries to skid under it, the crown of her head slamming against metal as she goes. She howls and tumbles to a stop, clutching her head; pain licks at her limbs, the places where his beasts had wounded her, and her skull pounds from the impact. Slowly that fades, the stinging in her skin remaining, and she claws at the wounds on her arm he’d caressed, snarling at empty air.

She’s _angry_ , she’s _pissed_ ; how _dare_ he imply that he could be stronger than her, she’d proven that false already hadn’t she? Neither him nor his beasts could match her in a fight, he must know that. And yet…

And yet.

She finds a loose ventilation grate and yanks it off, clambering inside. All these Corpus bases have the same specs, she can hide here like she hid on Jupiter. She curls in on herself, feeling her stomach ache from his tainted blood; she’d be hungry soon, have to find something. But this was too jarring, too confusing, the choice in front of her, paralyzing.

She growls at herself, angry at this conflict. She’d— she’d figure it out. She’d weigh the choices, and decide. And whatever she chose, she’d be fine.

He’s not stronger than her.

He can’t hurt her.

 

————————————————————————————————————————

 

He finds her days later huddled in a ventilation pipe, a different one than she’d taken refuge in before; she’d scoured the base for any human life, clawing open long-disused corridors and rooms, shrieks of anger and hunger echoing hollowly off the walls. Nothing, nothing but Infested matter, inedible and infuriating. She’d dragged herself into the hole in the wall, wedging herself back far enough that his creatures couldn’t pull her out again. 

So he drags a fresh corpse to her hiding place and drops it in front of the vent opening, then steps back and waits. Not thirty seconds after he stops moving, she rockets out of the vent and cannons into the corpse, tearing into it savagely. 

The sounds she makes are horrific, squelchings and rippings and gulpings, but they hardly seem to touch him now. He is not disturbed by her display of gluttony the way he used to be. She finishes messily, licking her hands and around her mouth. There’s blood everywhere; in her haste she’s wasted a good deal of it, and she whines at the ruined puddles on the floor. 

He steps forward and she jerks back, a hiss starting up; like a cornered animal, he thinks. He stops in front of the body, watching her. “I have more for you, if you would, hnn, wish.”

Her bloodshot eyes narrow, crouched near enough the vent for quick escape. “Why?”

His smile is wry, Infested tendrils waving slowly. “I care for my companions don’t I? And regardless of your, hmm, previous murder attempts, I cannot allow you to fall into such ill health.” She glowers, but stands up anyway. “Show me.”

He’s managed to collect a small number of live Grineer from a recent attack on a galleon, and they’re corralled into a small side room; she vaults over the Infested standing guard and massacres them, sucking each one dry before launching herself at the next. He watches her idly from the door, and moves forward when she makes to wrench the ventilation grate off the ceiling. 

“No need to go running off again, my fighters can find you again just as easily, yes.”

She glowers, but there’s little heat in it now. “Do you have a better offer?” 

His smile is oily and it makes her hackles rise. “I may have, hah, something.”

He finds her a room in the empty barracks with working plumbing and a solid door, and leaves her to her own devices. She spends a half hour collecting every moldy moth-chewed blanket and cushion in the complex, and arranges them into a fairly serviceable blanket fort. She uses the stiff, thin mattresses from the cots as walls and structure, packs the inside with slightly ratty softness, and hisses menacingly at the mournful-looking Infested that watch her work. The effect is mitigated somewhat by the fact that the hiss comes from inside a _blanket fort_ , but they hardly seem to notice, or care. 

She stays like this for a couple days, sleeping and getting the lay of the place, and he sends down a live captive or two every now and then. It forms into an uneasy routine, with her wary of him and skittish now, and him shrewdly calculating how he wants to proceed. The spots on her arm where he’d planted his cells sprout slowly, forming small, bulbous growths that tingle faintly and twitch at the underlying muscle. She panics when she first finds them, clawing them out savagely and scrubbing the new cuts under hot water. They grow back, but this time they wither and dry up, falling apart and scabbing over of their own accord. Dead flesh, it seems, does not make a good home for the Technocyte virus. 

They’re far enough away from the sun now that its light isn’t really a problem, and his lack of a sleep drive renders day and night functionally meaningless; she sleeps when she wants, and prowls the decrepit corridors otherwise. She peers at his research, looking in on gestating monstrosities and garbled research notes; he draws from his memories of her vivisection, plotting and planning where he would plant Mutalist seeds, how he would shape the resulting changes. 

There’s a war inside her, a rare paralyzing indecision; stay or go, submit or resist. She doesn’t _want_ these things in her, the thought makes her twitchy and half-savage. But his words rattle around her head like dice, and this old, old anxiety wakes and starts gnawing on her stomach. She’s been confident in her strength for a long time, and to have that suddenly questioned, cast into doubt, its jarring beyond anything.

She finds comfort, as she usually does, in killing, and persuades him to send her out hunting again. This serves a dual purpose; she brings him back Tenno and other test subjects, and feeds herself in the process. 

His mutation spreads by the day, creeping over his back and chest and down his left leg; it oozes into his mind, keeping him frantic and intent on his creations, and he watches her out of the corners of his eyes and croons at her about the majesty of this corruption. 

One day he seeks her out and finds her eating, startling her back from her still-groaning victim. She growls, mouth still full of blood. “What now?”

He’s standing close, and she backs up a step, uncomfortably aware of his proximity and the closeness of the walls. “It has occurred to me that I have, heh, outstanding debts. I don’t like to leave my debts unpaid.”

She regards him warily. “So you’ve, what, come to repay that?”

“Precisely.” 

“And how are you going to do that?”

One hand goes to her thigh, and he closes the gap between them. “An act for an act, wouldn’t you, nng, say?”

She blinks slowly, considering this. It makes her tense to allow him this close, no telling what he could do, but… ah fuck it, she’s got warmth in her veins and half a meal to finish, and she deserves a treat. 

“Repay me, then.”

His hand moves inwards and feels for her groin, and privately he marvels at the ease of this; old inhibitions gone, no hesitation, and more than that, he wants to see her squirm and knows how to make it happen. She leans back against the wall behind her, letting the half-dead Grineer fall, and he presses in and rubs through her clothes, feeling heat. 

He moves in under the fabric, over hair and skin, to stroke inward, and she purrs, arching into it. She goes to mouth at his throat, out of habit, but wrinkles her nose at the memory of his poison blood; she goes for his mouth instead, startling him. She sucks at his tongue, scraping lightly with the points of her teeth, and he responds in kind, making a pleased sound in his throat. 

He presses his fingers in and rubs at her clit and she croons into his mouth. He moves his mouth down along her jaw, darting his tongue at her throat, but she flinches back, and he smirks and sucks wetly at it. 

She growls and pricks her claws under his coat, pulling downward. “There’s better places for that mouth.”

He snorts and allows himself to be pushed down to his knees, easing her pants down and curling a finger into her. She pants shallowly and he finds her clit with his tongue, stroking it; he can feel her trembling slightly, sparks of heat rising in his own gut. 

He works the finger in her slowly, sliding another in beside it, and she moans above him, inner flesh slick and rippling. He sucks on her clit and her voice hitches into a higher sound, hips jerking. He does it again, curling the fingers in her to stroke that sweet spot, and she cries out and convulses; he can feel her muscles clench, feel her shaking against the wall behind her, and he smiles. 

He pulls his fingers out slowly, licking his lips, and she purrs contentedly. “Ohh yeah, I needed that.” He stands, wiping his slicked fingers on a scrap of cloth, and she reaches over for her meal, yanking it upright. “Gimme a sec.”

She jerks her pants back into place and opens the Grineer’s jugular, gulping down what’s left in him with low, pleasurable sounds. She drops the husk after a minute, purring, and kisses him again, taking his chin in one hand. He pauses, then reciprocates; she tastes of blood, and he of her own fluids, and there is a pleasant pressure of lips and tongues and teeth, and when he breaks for air she grins lazily. 

“Step into my pillow fort and lets discuss this Mutalist business.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More smut and body horror.

“You don’t like being beaten.”

She flinches, but that’s more from the needle in her spine than from his comment. “Does anyone?”

He draws the plunger back, extracting a measure of spinal fluid, and slides the needle out from between her vertebrae. “Usually no, but I’ve, hmm, noticed things.” She twists her head around to watch him, and he turns her head back to lie flat with one hand, straightening her spine again.

He makes a small incision between her shoulder blades and continues. “Every time you’ve been, heh, incapacitated by an outside force, you’ve shut down. When the fight is winnable you’re unrelenting, vicious,” and she preens at this praise, regardless of the tiny seed of biomass being inserted in the cartilage of her spine. “But when you are outmatched or, hnng, overpowered, your priorities shift. You flee your opponent, seek to distance yourself and avoid all further contact, yes.”

He removes the minuscule prongs he was using to place the seed, and folds the flesh of her back to its original position, stitching up the incision. She winces. “Well that’s sensible isn’t it? If the fight’s not going well, no point in sticking around to see if maybe they’d be so kind as to give you a few openings. Get the hell out of dodge or get splatted across the walls.” 

He motions for her to roll over and she does so, settling flat on her back. He takes her left hand and turns it palm-up, making an incision along the tendons in her inner arm. “Survival above victory.”

She watches as he places another seed of Mutalist flesh, meant to grow and change the surrounding cells. “Victory doesn’t mean much if you’re dead.”

“You _are_ dead.”

“You know what I mean.”

He sews up the slit in her arm and moves further up to her head. She watches him, keeping tensely still as he straps her head down with leather bands around her throat and forehead. “You’re not going to enjoy this.”

“So get it over with quickly.”

He smirks and pries her left eyelid open and sets it with a spreading clamp. The scarlet iris stares up at him, split by a vertical pupil, and the tiny incision he makes in the jelly of her eye makes her hiss in through her teeth, other eye clenched shut. Her body’s ramrod stiff, hands clenched tight enough to crumple the sides of the metal table. He inserts the third seed quickly, planting it close to her optic nerve, and withdraws his instruments, allowing her to close the eyelid and undoing the restraints.

She sits up quickly, clutching her eye with one hand and letting out pained gasps. He rinses his instruments and sets them aside, watching her squirm. Her face is screwed up in discomfort, her impregnated eye weeping red-tinged tears. “Ahh, that hurts…”

“They should sprout and begin integration within minutes.”

And she can feel it, all three of them hot in her flesh, the one in her eye pulsating, and sharp jabs of pain start to radiate out from it. The flesh around it bubbles and spasms, turning an ugly purple color, and the veins in her hand start to bulge and throb. Her back suddenly spasms and she yells, toppling off the table. He crouches down next to her, pulling her up onto his legs as she writhes. 

She cries out, left arm twisting and bulging into claws, the seed in her flesh digging in roots and causing rapid mutation. Her back arches sharply and he strokes her face, cooing to her that _yes it hurts, yes it’s agony, but you will be great, you will be beautiful, you will be like me, yes._

It spreads down her back in a mottled stain, bulging up into nodules and small tendrils, and her eye pops like a grape, unpeeling into a messy globular thing, shiny and solid red. She spasms and clings to him, gasping her pain, and he hardly notices her claws digging furrows in his skin. 

Her left arm now ends in a set of huge claws, more pronounced than the sturdy nails on her other hand, and wickedly curved. A swath of her face has gone bruise-purple, streaked through with glowing bits. She whines in her throat, twitching slightly, and he caresses her new arm. “Marvelous…”

She tries to stand, but her legs won’t cooperate, and she hisses at him to get her something to eat, to kill; he hauls in a Corpus crewman and she drags him down, sinking her new claws into his chest and ripping into him. She drinks her fill, the tendrils sprouting from her back quivering, and she sags into his arms afterwards, dead weight.

“Sleep,” she mumbles, blood-spattered and feverish, and he hauls her back to her nest. He slots her in and pulls ratty blankets over her curled form, considering for a moment joining her; but no, he must work, and he feels no tug of sleep. He covers her up and goes back to his makeshift labs, fingers of his left hand twitching reflexively.

Soon…. soon.

 

——————————————————————————————————————————

 

She sleeps for days more, and he’s savvy enough by now to send in a handful of live specimens ahead of him when she finally shows signs of waking. Once the screaming stops he walks in to find her stripping meat from bone, chewing it messily and sucking blood down from open arteries. Before, months before, such a sight would have revolted him, reduced him to a nauseous wreak; now, the strongest thought that comes to mind is that she seems to have gone carnivorous in addition to hematophagious. 

“Are you sure that’s, hm, good for you?”

“Fuck if I know, I want it.”

He remains standing, heedless of the puddle of gore. This new flesh has its desires, he knows; his body craves expansion, infection to new hosts, and… other things. If he lets his gaze linger on the entrails too long, thoughts of its taste and texture start to drift into his head, and the ferocity with which she dismembers and consumes the bodies before her is enough for him to guess how the virus is affecting her. 

She slows and finishes gorging herself, crawling back into the bulk of her nest. The ravenous horde would take care of the mess, he supposes. They were happy enough to dispose of any failed experiments he threw their way, even those that bore signs of their own flesh. He sits down on the pile next to her, and she blinks at him, bewildered.

“I need to run a followup inspection.”

She grunts and glowers, but hauls herself mostly upright. He stretches out her new arm, testing its flex and stretch and measuring the claws. They’ve already been proven efficient killing tools, the mess of the former crewmen could attest to that, and he’s almost giddy thinking of what they’ll do to an unlucky Tenno. 

He checks the spread of Infested matter over her back, splaying his fingers over her skin. Her spine curves under them, new muscle groups spreading out from the point of infection like wings, like twitching ropes. He rests his forehead against the nape of her neck and breathes in her scent, a chemical code that now spells out _friend, family, one and the same._

Her new eye is glistening red, a paler, more orange color than the deep crimson of its sister. She looks mismatched, and there’s no noticeable change when he shines a light into the orb; there might not even be a pupil in there, he can’t tell. 

He’s muttering under his breath, fixing the data in his mind, and she twitches, growling, “Shut up.”

“I am merely—”

“No not you, _them_.” She gestures to her head, grimacing. A smile twitches the corners of his mouth. “Ah, you hear them too now.”

She scratches viciously at her scalp. “I don’t like it. What _are_ they? Can’t be that cannon fodder out there, they haven’t the brains of a goose.”

“Something bigger, something greater than either of us. Something out there, in the Void.”

She glowers, hunching her shoulders. “Well it can keep its eldritch whispers to itself.”

“Oh but why?” He leans in, halfway to a leer. “You can learn, heh, so much, from what they say, what they instruct, yes.” 

She sneers, bristling slightly. “Is that so?”

His fingers brush the growths on the side of her face and she twitches, eyes flicking down and then back to his face, dangerously close. The whispers in her head are pulling strings, making her skin go hot and tingling. She eyes the curve of his jaw, teeth pressed together. 

His breathing’s gone heavy, and she can hear something rattling in his lungs. “Y-yes, they can be quite… informative, yes…”

He swallows and she wants his blood on her hands, his breath in her mouth, a rush of violent desire that makes her salivate, hair standing on end. But he kisses her before she can move, a tight, hot crush of mouths, and she reciprocates with a deep, heady sound. 

She traces his blunt teeth with her tongue and he bites it, making her laugh derisively and nip his lips. His blood still revolts her, she finds, but she endures the few drops that seep out. He presses her back, down into the mound of blankets, sucking at her lips; she feels his sallow chest, the thinness of his ribcage, hands over mottled skin. He groans over her, vibrating with need. “Oh, yes, this is— this is good, yes, I—”

She pants, hot and tight in her gut. “Is this them, is this— that thing…”

“Yes,” he croons, “yes but, don’t— don’t resist it, don’t… just _submit_ …”

A moment of silence, and then she surges up, knocking him over hard, and scrambles to her feet; her eyes are wide with something approaching panic, and he lunges, grabbing her wrist. “No! Wait, p…please, don’t run…” 

She looks down at him, sclera a stark white ring around the red in her remaining eye. “I can’t, I _won’t_ …” He sees her swallowing frantically, feels her instinct to flee at the word _submit_ , and strokes the inside of her wrist with his thumb, so softly. “Shh, shh… they can’t, nng, make you do anything, you are… safe, yes.”

She looks at him critically, fingers twitching slightly, then sinks to her knees. He levers himself properly upright and kisses her until she relaxes. He can feel the flush in her skin, the painful hardness at his groin, and her kisses get sharper and more insistent. “Ah, I want—”

He moves up on the pile, disrobing as best he can. “Open your mouth for me, my dear…” and she does, stretching out her tongue and taking him entirely, making him gasp in pleasure. She wraps her tongue around his shaft and hollows her cheeks, and his nerve endings light up like firecrackers, dragging obscene sounds from his throat and making him jerk his hips into her. She cups the rises of his hipbones, tracing her claws lightly over pale skin, and he watches her suck him off, the sight making him feel filthy things.

He strokes her head, cupping her cheek in his palm, and croons at her. “Ohh _yes_ , such a good girl, such a good, hnng, _monster_ … yesss, we w-will be— o-ohh _do that again_ …”

The tightness builds in his gut, making him gasp and shudder, but before he can reach his climax she pulls back, flushed with her own need. He whines pitifully as she strips fully, climbing on top of him and kissing him with frightening force, groaning as she grinds herself down onto him, rubbing her vulva lengthwise along his shaft. He pants raggedly, bucking up into her. “P-please, I need…” and she makes desperate, breathy sounds as she lines herself up. 

She opens around him like a flower, like a wound, and she’s so slick and hot that he cries out as if in pain, feeling her weight shudder above him. She moans shamelessly, rocking above him, and he notes dimly that his hypothesis so long ago was correct, a recent meal of fresh, hot blood has driven her internal temperature to blissful heights. 

He strokes her abdomen, her ribs, his human hand ungloved; the softness of her skin is intoxicating. She gasps slightly when he plays with her nipples, the sensitive skin tightened into hard little nubs under his fingers. Her inner walls are rippling around him, but like this their movement is limited; he can’t thrust like he wants to, and her grinding produces imperfect results. Gathering himself, he flips them both up and over, rolling so that she’s sprawled below him, still joined. She gasps at the movement, but groans low and sultry when he starts moving in and out slowly, testing the waters. The new friction sends both of them spasming, nerves screaming sensation. She writhes below him and he feels a sharp rush of satisfaction and grotesque pleasure that he’s making this happen, that he can take her apart like this. His thrusts become faster, more purposeful, and she arches deliciously, claws catching in the fabric below them. 

He caresses her face, his thumb tracing her lips. “You are, ahnn, simply divine, like this… oh my pretty, my little killer, how does it feel?”

She huffs out a laugh, sucking his fingers lewdly. “Just fuck me you meatsack, you can romance me later.”

He sneers but obliges, snapping his hips into her hard enough to make her cry out, and keeps up that new punishing pace. She thrashes and he takes hold of her wrists, pinning them down for fear of accidental lacerations; she pants wantonly, clenching wetly around him. He feels his orgasm rising again, tightening that coiling pleasure in his gut, and moments later he screams off the edge, shuddering with his release. She follows, inner walls clenching and rippling around him, and her spine arches back in a sharp curve, panting out a heady string of “yes, yes, yes, yes…”

After the shockwaves have subsided they lie tangled together, exhausted and very warm. He eases himself out of her, sticky with mingled fluids, and they lie there for a while, utterly sated. After maybe ten minutes she shifts, wriggling out from under him only to yank a blanket over them both, burrowing back into his chest. He accepts this, brain very tired and very quiet, and he decides he doesn’t mind a quick nap here. 

Some time later he wakes again, eyes snapping open to see her lying beside him, watching him carefully. She blinks slowly, seeing he’s awake.

“I want to eat you alive.”

She strokes his face slowly, clawtips just grazing his skin. “I want to hold your life in my teeth, do you understand?”

His mouth is dry, and he attempts to moisten it. “Do you hate me?” he asks.

“I… don’t know,” she answers, frowning like she’s never considered it. “This flesh— it hurts, and you’ve done so many other things to me… This might not be hate… but it looks an awful lot like it.”

“Do you love me?”

“Does it matter?”

When he doesn’t reply she sneers, curling her lip. “I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone properly. It comes out wrong, even when I try, it comes out… wrong.”

She doesn’t seem inclined to say more after that, and he can think of nothing else to beak the silence with; he closes his eyes and they both fall back asleep again, the ruined base around them eerily quiet and empty.

 

—————————————————————————————————————————

 

He’s woken again by the sound of retching, and peers groggily up at his beast hurling into a bucket. He sits up, rubbing the sleep from his face. “Can’t have been that bad, heh, could it?”

She glowers at him, looking very green. “I dunno about you, but I don’t remember eating anything like this.” She tips the bucket towards him, showing what looks like a good half gallon of frog eggs and bile. He blinks, nonplussed. Her face twists, and she yanks it back to spit another wave of the things out into the slush. 

“The hell even _are_ these,” she gripes, rolling one of the little spheres between her fingers while he fumbles his clothes back on. “No way the meat could have done this…” but she’s frowning like she’s not sure _what_ the meat was capable of, with the virus digging its roots through her body.

He plucks another murky green orb from the bucket and holds it up to his face to examine it. It promptly explodes into something slimy and pink and wriggling, and he yelps and throws it ungracefully.

It bounces and skitters and _squeaks_ and she’s leaping up as the rest of the bucket jerks and pops into pink little larva, like awful popcorn. Her foot comes down hard on the first one skittering around her feet, squashing it into an oily pink smear on the floor, and the rest of the bucket is soon to follow, the creature smashing them in a flurry of disgust and horrified confusion. Alad picks up a straggler, peering at the squirming thing. 

“You did, er… bring these up, correct?”

She scowls up at him, wiping her slimy feet on one of the rattier blankets. “…yes.”

“I have a, hm, hypothesis… on their origins.”

She stares at him, eyes widening. “…don’t you fucking dare.”

“That these are—”

“Don’t you fucking say it!”

“—the product of our… union.”

She screeches and kicks the bucket vehemently, hands fisted in her hair. “HOW THE FUCK! WHAT THE FUCK! HOW! THE FUCK!”

He moves out of her way, absurdly calm. “I do wish you hadn’t destroyed them, it would have been, heh, interesting to see how they matured.”

She knocks the squirming larva from his hand, kneading at her forehead and looking mildly green. “Those two systems aren’t even _connected_ , how the fuck did they get _in_ there?” Her lip curls. “I’m halfway tempted to let you open me up again to see, this isn’t fucking natural.”

His face twists in amusement. “My dear, _nothing_ about us is natural.” 

She snorts, and she can’t figure out if she likes the way he says _us_ or not.

“And besides,” he says as he wipes his gloves clean of residual goo, “we can always, hnn, make more.”

She barks out a rueful laugh. “That’s disgusting.”

An expectant pause, then: “Let’s do it.”

They fall together back to the pile of blankets, stroking and rutting till they’re both heavy and warm with want, then he flips her over and presses in from behind, making her arch under him. He wraps his deformed arm around her ribs, pressing his chest to her back and panting roughly; she curves slowly, grinding back into him, and he bites the nape of her neck, making her hiss.

An hour later she heaves up another stomachful of the slimy little eggs and he takes them to study, intrigued and only slightly disturbed. She takes another of his human test subjects for a late breakfast, and makes rude comments about the little larva while he works.

 

—————————————————————————————————————————

 

He lets her have the next group of spies they find, crewmen sent by Frohd Bek to root out his location and bring back valuable data on his progress and strengths. She gleefully chases them through the halls of the base, playing a deadly game of hide-and-seek; she isolates them one by one and cuts them down. The last one she toys with, keeping just on his heels and wearing him down, delighting in his frantic terror. 

Finally she herds him into a dead end, pins him up against a door overgrown with fungal pods, and sucks in his sweat-soaked scent. He’s paper-white with fear, and pressed back against the metal as far as he can go; his legs are pure jelly, and his breath comes in short staccato bursts. He’s _whimpering_ , and she grins languidly at him.

“So sorry,” she lies, bracing herself against the jammed door with both hands. “but hey, if you knew how good you tasted you’d want to eat you too.”

He’s stammery and tongue-tied from fear. “L-listen, please, just— just let me go, yeah? I-I won’t s-say a word, I swear, I’ll— gyaah!”

He cuts off in a gurgled yelp as she licks a hard stripe up his jugular, tasting cold and clammy skin. She purrs, vibrating with anticipation, and he flinches away and yells when she mouths at the vein, sucking small red marks into the skin. He tries to shove her off, scrabbling at her and trying to twist away, but she pins him still with her weight and forces his head to the side.

Her teeth make him scream, a high, broken sound no human should make, and she groans in satisfaction at the hot gush in her mouth. She draws greedily, swallowing down his life in eager mouthfuls, and he screams and pleads and screams some more. 

A hand on her back makes her pause, pull away from her meal and look up. “I’m _terribly sorry_ ,” Alad says with mock sincerity, “but you really should know better than to come here so, hhn, brashly, and my pet does need to eat, yes.”

He moves in and scrapes his tongue over the wet, red wound, swirling the taste around in his mouth. “Interesting, hah, vintage.”

She snorts and elbows him out of the way. “It’s not wine you weirdo,” and he smirks, watching her sink her teeth into the ruined flesh again, her meal shaking and whimpering at the horror of it all. He watches her glut herself with something approaching amusement, and rubs at the nodules between her shoulderblades. 

“When you have finished here, I have a, hnn, assignment for you, yes.”

She mumbles an affirmative, waving a hand absently; her victim’s gone limp and pale, like a steamed vegetable, and she chases his flagging pulse to the finish. When it finally sputters out she lets the body slide down heavily, wiping her mouth on her shirt, and heads back to his main lab room. 

He shows her a Corpus merchant ship, shows her where the excavated cache of dormant Tenno should be, and kisses her forehead, lips warm. 

“Seek. Kill. Bring me back something I can work with, my dear, and I will reward you.”

She preens and takes one of the few working cruisers, dropping into the cargo ship and using the vents to find the vault with the cryopods. She debates going in sneaky, debates staying a while and having some fun with the ship’s population, but the alien sounds in her head urge haste, urge her to get the cargo and move. So she plants a few spawn pods at the other end of the ship, waits for them to hatch and for the screaming to start, and then swoops into the now-unguarded vault and hauls them one by one into the nearest airlock.

The creaky old AI in the cruiser she took tractors up flush with the hull and she shoves them all in, an ungainly pile of Tenno eggs. She looks back and whines, wanting so very badly to join in the fun, but there’s pressure around her skull and she shakes her head doggedly, ordering the ship to retrace its path. 

She examines the pods on the way back, picking out the frames inside. There’s a full team of four, still snoozing; a Volt, a Nova, an Ember, and… hello, what are you? A frame she hasn’t seen before, yellow and somewhat angular. She thought she’d seen all of them, is this one new? She peers at it through the glass, turning it over in her head. Oh he’s gonna love this one he is, all shiny and new for the dissecting, or whatever he wants them for. She grins all the way back, clawed arm twitching.

She carries the new pod to his lab herself, the others dragged by a couple of Ancients, and hollers for him. 

“Hey! Hey check this out.” She drops the pod, splaying a hand on the glass. He steps over and peers inside, eyes bright. “Ohh what have we here?” 

His smile grows giddy, the growths on his back and shoulder rising on end. “A new Warframe, oh my, this… hah, this is excellent, my newest project, oh she’ll be perfect for it, yes.” He looks up at her, advancement alive in his chest. “My dear, this deserves a treat.”

He stands up and hurries out, his gait slightly off-kilter with the weight of his Infested flesh. He's back within minutes, and he tosses something to her as he goes; she catches it, and it’s warm and malleable in her hand. 

It’s a transfusion bag full of blood and she perks up, squishing it in both hands. She sniffs it over and the scent leaking through the plastic makes her blink in surprise, old and familiar.

“No way…” She nips open the tube at the top and coats her tongue with it, purring. “Fuck, this is yours!”

“I had a, heh, few pints drawn once my work with the Technocyte virus became more, hmm, in depth. For… emergencies, yes.” He’s watching her suck it down with obvious relish, purring and squeezing the bag empty. He steps closer and cups her cheek, fervent. “This new Tenno will be, hnn, glorious under my hands, my sweet… Bring me more to work with and you will have more of my — of the old me’s — blood, yes.” 

She purrs and preens under this promise, mouth stained red and smiling.


	10. Chapter 10

They’d come for him again, armed with coordinates to his location and burning weapons, the Tenno still hunted him. In the absence of Zanuka, his new pet had taken her place as primary defender, tearing into the intruders around clouds of stinging spores and potshots from his own acid rifle. Afterwards she stands panting, half-soaked in gore and sporting more than a few wounds of her own. The fingers of her clawed hand twitch, dripping gobbets of flesh, and she absently licks a talon clean.

He lays down his rifle, surveying the carnage, and his eyes narrow in irritation. He comes up behind her, boots splashing slightly in puddles of blood. 

“My dear, my sweet, my… _precious_ little killer…” He’s almost flush against her back now, one arm snaking around her waist and the other hand coming up to clasp around her throat. “Do me a favor, yes, and _leave them alive next time_.” 

A growl starts up in her chest, and he can feel the vibrations through his fingers. “Oh I am _so sorry_ for saving your life again, next time they come after you I’ll be sure to stay on the sidelines and watch them tear you to bits.”

His hand tightens on her throat, mounting anger making his voice come low and dangerous. “I need live specimens for my research, for this, hnn, grand work. You must restrain and capture them, to waste them on your… violent urges, yes, is _unacceptable_.”

She turns her head just enough to show him the red of her eye. “Then you can take them on yourself. Alone.”

Her weight shifts and she slams the heel of her foot down on the arch of his, making him hiss and tighten his grip; his arms are like steel bands now, and she snarls and pitches forward, dragging him into a roll. They grapple, tumbling in among the corpses and trying to pin each other. But she’s worn from the battle and his strength is backed by Infested muscle. She’s hobbled, too, unable to use her teeth for fear of his poison blood, and he manages to wrestle her down flat on her stomach, wrenching her left arm back painfully and planting his knee on her other shoulder.

She seethes, face smeared into some unidentifiable organ, and he pulls her shoulder further out of alignment, making her yowl. “This is not, nng, pleasant for me, you know. I do not enjoy having to reprimand you so.” 

She coughs out a harsh laugh. “At least I don’t lie about it, you’re as fucked in the head as I am.”

As if she hadn’t spoken he leans in, easing her arm back down and stroking her head. “Do not fight me, my pet, our enemies are, hnn, too near for us to be dividing our strengths like this.” 

He moves his weight off her so she can sit up, rolling her shoulder stiffly. She shows her teeth at the approach of his fingers, but allows him to wipe the worst of the gore from her cheek. “Shh my dear,” he coos, sweet to her now, “you were marvelous, yes, beautiful against them. But I need living test subjects, surely you understand that. Surely you would not want to hinder my work, to… disappoint me, yes.”

He kisses her softly, and she responds after a moment. “You know I am good to you,” he murmurs in between kisses, “you know I will reward you if you do as I ask.” Another kiss, and a hand light on her jaw. “Why resist my will?”

“Stubbornness,” she responds, tasting his lips, “belligerence. Old, mm, habits.” 

“Qualities best turned towards our enemies my dear.” 

She makes a distracted noise, kissing him longer; he reciprocates, then breaks off to help her to her feet. She’s sopping with blood, stained crimson all over, and he eyes her critically. “Come. You’re filthy.”

She snorts and follows him. “Says you.”

She strips off her ruined clothes and ducks under the steaming spray with relish. The base had only become more overgrown with Infested mass, forming fleshy tunnels and membranes, like it was becoming one huge living thing, and the growths had taken over some of the usual mechanical functions; there is some kind of organ far below that produced an extraordinary amount of heat, and it has grown over and around many of the water pipes threaded through the base. The result is a decent hot water supply.

She scrubs herself clean, the water running pink down the drain for a good long while, and rinses her hair out under the spray. She comes out clean and pink from the heat, and mellowed considerably. 

They settle on a bed of plush Infested flesh, pulsating softly beneath them. She curls up to his chest, nosing absently at his throat, and he strokes down her back, the nodules and tendrils rising at his touch. She purrs, running her hands down his sides.

He rotates her twisted shoulder gently, making her tense slightly, but he only makes a contemplative face. “Perhaps a more elastic kind of tendon… if I know it’s a, hm, weak spot, I wouldn’t want it to remain so.” He kisses her forehead, feeling her spine under his fingers. “You must be perfect, yes.”

She traces patterns on his chest, relaxing further. They doze, her falling back into sleep — she still craves that state, he can’t figure out why — him slipping into a thoughtless torpor, not unconscious but merely… drifting. They stay like that for a while, still and quiet.

 

—————————————————————————————————————————

 

She’s clutching her arm, the flesh burning dully under the skin, and hisses. “This isn’t working.”

He looks up from the corpse of his latest protege, the Warframe’s skin split open down the middle and dead Infested flesh oozing out in crumbling chunks. His face is twisted in grief and angry frustration, left hand clenching in spasms. “This… I can fix, hng, this. We… we are not beaten, not yet, we—”

“ _We_ ,” she bursts out, claws digging into her mutated shoulder, “we are _dying_ , Alad, I am _crippled_! This arm’s about ready to fall off and I can barely see out of this eye, and you think we’ve still got a chance?”

He snarls back, heaving himself to his feet. “You, you cannot be, hhn, broken so easily. You, no, we are not so _weak_ as that.” 

She stalks forward, head down and thrust forward, arching her back. “This shit wasn’t meant to live in me, whatever you did to it _didn’t work_.” She hisses the last few words, almost nose to nose with him now, and he nearly vibrates with anger. “What have I told you,” he growls, low and through clenched teeth, “about defying me like this? Do not test my patience now my _sweet_ , I need you standing with me now more than ever.”

Her lip curls, eyes narrow and mocking. “Hah, you. You’re as bad as I am, slowest you’ve ever been. That shit’s dragging you down, and I can hear it eating at your lungs.” She takes another step, forcing him back one. “You’re rotting on the inside Alad, and it’s about time you realized it.”

He gives a roar of fury and lashes at her head, but she dodges back, left arm held close to her body. “ENOUGH,” he howls, ripping the collar crusted with Infested protrusions from his neck. “If you will not, hgg, submit to me, return to this grand plan willingly, then I will have to… force you.”

She snarls, bristling fiercely, and rushes him, human arm lashing for his chest. He blocks with the wide collar, her claws leaving deep scratches in the metal, and he shoves forward, slamming the edge under her chin and clicking her teeth against her tongue. She howls, recoiling, and he slams the thing over her head, locking the disk around her neck.

She shrieks, doubling over, eyes going tight with pain and clawing at the collar. There’s pressure round her skull, in her brain, in her chest; she wants, she wants, she wants. She wants victory, she wants conquest, she wants her own flesh spread planet to planet in a glorious wave of change and unity and— 

She wants it _off_.

She pries her fingers under the edge and _wrenches_ , and the thing gives an awful screech of tearing metal and gives, stripping off her in two pieces. She stares at his pale, stricken face, and sees red.

“You would use that… on me. You would do that to _me_!”

He snarls desperately, reaching for his rifle, but she cannons into him, a screeching ball of rage. He howls and tries to block, to get her off, anything, but she tears into him anyway, sinking the claws of her good arm into his side and opening him like any other enemy. He screams, pain like fire shooting through him and she rips and rips, claws hooking into and splitting soft organs. He seizes, voice breaking almost into sobs, and she scrambles off him, dripping red. 

He’s still howling, one side of his abdomen ripped open messily, oozing viscera, and she swallows heavily, suppressing a sudden, absurd resurgence of the desire to eat him, to drink him dry. She shakes gore off her hand, a deep, burning ache flaring again in her infected bones, and she bares her teeth at the pain. She opens her mouth… but to say what? He’s never been this wounded before, anyone else would succumb to injuries like that. What if he dies? What if he _lives_?

So instead she looks away and says, “I need to get this out of me, need to… You… do what you want. But I’m done.”

She turns and limps out of sight, leaving him bleeding on the floor, gasping for air.

——————————

She seeks out Vor. She takes a month and a half to get to Mercury, the burning little coal of a planet overrun with Grineer, making savage little attacks on the easiest prey she can find on the way to keep herself mostly sane. It hardly occurs to her to bother landing; the tiny ship just slams right into the base and she crawls from the wreckage and sinks her teeth into the first living thing she finds. 

They swarm over her, filling her with iron and lead, but these are the weakest grunts the empire has to offer and she’s wild with hunger and desperation. She carves a bloody swath through the base, towards the pit at the center where the Captain meets his challengers. He’s there, armed to the teeth, and he catches her in the shoulder with his pistol before she meets his blade head on, howling wordlessly. He parries her strike, laughing uproariously and leering at her darting around him. 

“Little viper, you’re looking unwell! Your master do that to you?”

She snarls and lashes at his metal legs, flinching back at the bite of his sword. “Shut up! Shut up and just fight me!”

He sneers and obliges, landing a slashing cut into the meat of her mutated arm, and she screeches, clawing him in the gut. Her nails leave scratches in the metal and tear furrows into what little flesh there is there, and he kicks her hard in the side of her knee, crunching something, and she screams and falls to her other knee.

He swoops and spears her through the chest, sword crunching through muscle and bone, and she chokes and doubles over, gasping raggedly. Her left arm is hanging limply and he jerks the hilt of his blade, tilting her torso up. Her face is twisted in pain, shaking and baring her teeth, and he curls his lip. 

“Get this shit out of me.”

He levels his pistol at her forehead.

The shot blows out the back of her head, and she falls, suddenly limp; he yanks his sword out of her chest and she slumps to her side, eyes blank and glassy, limbs askew. He flicks gore from his blade, disdainfully, and turns away from the corpse. The Infested flesh on her body is starting to sizzle, sloughing off in strips, and he snorts in contempt. Disgusting creature.

——————————

He makes the transmission haltingly, the ragged scar in his side burning. He sends it out and swallows heavily, filled with unpleasant emotions; frustration, bitterness, uncertainty.

"Ah Tenno, I admit I've made mistakes, terrible mistakes that have left me crippled with decay. Now I ask you for your... mercy. Tyl Regor's hidden cloning labs hold secrets, secrets that could prove most regenerative for- for me. If- If I get you into the labs, will you bring me the data I need? What do you say? Will you give a sick man one more chance?”


	11. Chapter 11

She comes back.

The treatments have been working, the Infested flesh atrophying and sloughing off him in crumbling chunks. He feels the hivemind hissing, feels its displeasure at his actions, but it’s losing interest in him already, turning away to other hosts, other puppets. He can already feel the voices fading.

She comes back wounded.

He doesn’t know how she finds him, doesn’t even know how she gets on board, he just finds her in a bloodied heap in the hallway, with a red, red trail leading back to god knows where. He yells and rushes to her on impulse, but flinches back before he touches her. At first glance she seems to be free of the Infestation, somehow, but…

He has crewmen in hazmat suits carry her to a sealed observation room, where he can ascertain if she’s being controlled by the hivemind or not. He’s nervous, twitchy and pale, and he watches her anxiously. She bleeds sluggishly on the table they’ve set her on and he orders a few good pints of transfusion blood, as fresh as they can get. 

It’s hours before she moves.

At first it’s just mindless feeding; she twitches, opens her eyes, sees the pile of transfusion bags in front of her, and tears into them before he can move, making for a messy ten minutes. She finally tries to stand, her wounds clotting up, and he’s shocked at how weak she looks. She can barely push herself up off the table, limbs shaking, and when she sees him through the thick plate glass, her face twists into something unreadable and she looks down, legs curled under her. He swallows thickly, watching her. 

“So… you’re back.”

“….I’m back.”

He’s about to ask how she got rid of the Infestation when her face crumples, back bowing over and arms wrapping around her torso. His brow furrows in concern, mouth open to ask, but she draws in a ragged breath and… and…

_Sweet profit she’s crying._

He gapes like a fish, uncomprehending, and she pounds the table with a shouted “ _Fuck_!”

“Fuck I can’t… I can’t do this.” She shakes her head fiercely, teeth grit, and glares over at him. “Just let me have you!”

“…what?”

She struggles up, straining, and staggers to the window, leaning against it. “Listen… I have nothing left. Nothing at all, here, my planet’s gone to shit, no other faction will take me, and none of them are keen on letting me run around unsupervised either. They’ll kill me sooner or later.”

A deep breath, too close to a sob, and he can see the tear tracks on her face with terrifying clarity. 

“…you’re the only person I have to go back to.”

Oh.

She’s alone.

Well, he… he can’t deny there’s… an attachment, of sorts. The Technocyte spores may be out of his head now, but it seems not everything they made him feel was artificial. He looks down, gut in knots, and she draws in a ragged breath.

“Let me have you… and you can have me.”

His head jerks up, slightly, realizing the scope of that offer. She’d resisted any control so thoroughly before, but now… she’s making a bargain for it. He remembers back before his folly with the Infestation, how she slept in his bed, traded blood and sexual favors for kills and test subjects, the uneasy and uncomfortable partnership there. A stark contrast to their… relationship, under the virus.

But if she’s offering herself in full this time… he could haggle, bargain, lay down rules to keep himself from being victimized as thoroughly as he was before, without the Technocyte to protect him. And looking at her now, thinking back to how they were together, infected… he doesn’t imagine she has the same level of tortuous intent as she used to. She doesn’t want to make him suffer, now. All she wants is comfort. 

He puts his hand against the glass and nods, slightly. “Deal.”

She blinks, as if she didn’t really think she’d get what she wanted, and then rests her forehead against the glass, exhaling. 

“…can I get out of here?”

He almost snorts — not the thanks he was expecting, but he should know better by now shouldn’t he. “Are you cured?”

She shrugs. “Think so.”

“…how did you manage it?”

“Got Vor to shoot me in the head.”

He stares at her. “You what.”

Another shrug. “It was a long shot. Guess it tricked the virus into thinking I was dead for good, so it noped out.”

“…and you recovered from that?”

“Eh, took a while. Noooot all that eager to do it again to be honest.”

He mulls this over, moving towards the door. She certainly seems cured… he can take the risk of releasing her. She waits intently behind the door as he keys in the code and it slides open. 

Hugging is… weird. Not exactly something he’s had much practice at, and she squeezes hard enough to crack ribs.

“So…”

“I need a bath, a meal, and to sleep for about seven years, in that order.”

He almost smiles.

Almost

————————

As promised, she spends an hour scrubbing her wounds clean in near-boiling water, lightens the crew by at least two gallons — he still doesn’t know where she _puts it all_ — and passes out on his bed. She stays there for almost three days, waking only briefly to demand and consume another gallon of blood, and he just maneuvers around her for his sleep cycle. Her wounds seem to heal slowly, and she eventually comes around, groggy but moving smoother, pain lessened.

He’s got the crew under strict orders to keep quiet about her in their communications. Most of them aren’t veterans from back before the Technocyte, and he doesn’t want his enemies, current or future, knowing he has her back yet. 

And he’s lost a lot since he made that colossal mistake; most of his funding gone, Zanuka finally destroyed for good, and half his accounts frozen. He has almost no research, no active projects, no means to start any, and what’s essentially a skeleton crew to keep him hidden and on the run. It’s a miracle she found him at all. 

The end result of this is that he’s going more than a little stir-crazy with almost nothing to occupy his mind. He’s pacing again by the time she’s conscious and showered, and he manages to not notice her until they nearly collide.

Miraculously, it’s him that has the reflexes to get out of the way with an embarrassing little half-jump, startled. She blinks groggily, half asleep on her feet, then frowns.

“Holy shit… how did I not notice your face.”

He touches the purplish scarring on reflex. “Ah, yes… there were, ah, stains my cure could not remove, so to speak.” 

She peers at it, apparently having forgotten the concept of personal space. “No kidding. You sure it’s not still in your head?”

“Within a point-three percent margin of error, yes.” He looks at her critically. “And speaking of which, I ought to examine you properly, to make sure your, ah… pretend suicide worked as well as you seem to think it did.”

She gives him a slightly groggy _look_. “You do remember what happened the last time you did that, right? That probably wasn’t just a vivid hallucination? I mean it might have been, considering what was in the air in that shithole, but still.”

His face remains flat. “Yes but _that_ was the influence of the hivemind, which you will notice is no longer with us.”

She presses a hand to her chest and widens her eyes dramatically. “You mean you never wanted me for me?”

He sputters, face heating; a trap! “I— that’s not… I never—” 

But she cackles and punches his arm lightly. “Man, you’re still so easy to tease. Come on, let’s get this over with.”

He huffs and herds her to the ship’s small lab, still blushing, and she just giggles along.

He sits her up on the examination table and has her take her shirt off. She needs new clothes, he notices, and quickly takes blood and flesh samples to examine. He peers into the eye he had changed — half blind still, grown back weak and sensitive — and her left arm — more of the same, weaker and scarred — and he writes quick notes as he looks. She watches him look her over, unreadable, and he jumps when she touches the scarring on his cheek. 

He blinks up at her and she rubs it softly with her thumb, feeling the texture of the warped skin, and there’s this stupid feeling of _vulnerability_ , as if he’s the one half naked and under scrutiny. 

She kisses him and he lets her.

Her mouth is lukewarm, almost cool, and tastes faintly of copper. He feels his face burning, feels the press of her lips, feels the edges of the tablet he was using to take notes digging into his palms as he grips it. Her hand strokes his cheek softly, so softly, and this is so unlike her that it makes him freeze up with nerves.

“Come to bed with me.”

He swallows thickly. “I thought we weren’t trying for a, hm, repeat of last time.”

She snorts, and the sound is familiar enough to break him out of his frozen state. “We’re not, stupid, I just… need to remember what you’re like. Besides, I’m probably just gonna fall asleep again.”

He chews the inside of his lip, thinking… well, he could use a nap anyway. He nods and turns quickly to put his samples away, and she pulls her shirt back on, stretching. 

She does indeed bellyflop onto his bed, and in the ten minutes it takes him to change into bedclothes and lock his small chambers she’s all but passed out again. He eases down next to her, almost apprehensive, but he mentally kicks himself for being so timid after all he’s been through, and makes himself put his arms around her.

She makes a small pleased sound and curls up into his chest, pressing up against his thin nightshirt, and oh, this feels nice. Not exactly warm, but the contact makes him feel an unexpected attachment. She nuzzles his collarbone, one arm draped over his ribs, and he can feel the ridges in her spine. The bed is soft and warming from his body heat, and he feels at ease.

He almost doesn’t remember to be afraid when she presses her nose up against his throat and inhales.

His arms clench suddenly, breath caught in his chest, but she just snorts and turns her head, resting it against his pulse. “Calm your tits, I’m not gonna do anything.”

“…and what reason do you have for abstaining?”

A small huff of breath, almost like a sigh. “…I don’t want to jeopardize this.”

He glances down at her, chewing her words over; so she’s willing to restrain herself for the sake of their… whatever they have, is that it?

“And besides, I don’t know if you’re still toxic to me.”

The corner of his mouth twitches. Not going to let her keep that excuse for long. “Well, there’s an easy way to test that.”

She wrinkles her nose against his chest. “Oh no you don’t, we’ll end up just like we st—”

But he’s grabbed a scalpel from the rolling surgical table he’s been using as a nightstand, because who doesn’t have insanely sharp things on their bedside table, and he’s nicked the pad of his thumb with it, and she freezes up.

A single drop wells up and she stares at it, throat locked mid-swallow, and part of him can’t believe he’s doing this, but the rest has been through too much to be squeamish now. The drop wobbles, threatening to fall, and her mouth opens on reflex, salivating. He sees his chance and takes it, touching his bleeding thumb to her tongue and she almost sighs, wrapping her tongue around it. He can _feel_ her shudder, and it feels… nice.

He likes that look on her face, he realizes. He may not like what he has to do to get it, but… well, he can find a way around that. 

She jerks back, eyes flying open, and practically vaults out of bed, leaving his hand damp with saliva. She hisses to herself and turns for the door, and he blinks at her, bewildered. 

“Wait, where are you going?”

“Food,” is all she says before the door slams behind her.

She stalks out and grabs the first crewman she sees, yanking him around a corner and prying his helmet off.

“I’m not going to kill you, so shut up and let me do this.”

She ignores his fumbled protests, pushes his head to the side, and bites down hard. He screams, muffled by her hand around his mouth, and she draws deep from the wound. She can’t be hungry around him now, gotta drown the taste of him.

Her meal’s gone limp and whimpering, his chest spasming under her, and she pulls her teeth out, breathing hard. She swallows thickly and shakes her head to clear it, a warm, pleasant weight in her belly now. She takes the crewman’s hand and presses it over the wound to help it clot, licking her lips idly. 

“Eat some tuna or something, don’t lift anything heavy, and, uh, yeah, this is normal now. Have fun.”

And then she’s gone, walking back quickly to Alad’s rooms. She slips inside, locking the door behind her, and throws herself back on the bed. He watches her sardonically, and she glowers.

“Shut it.”

“…need I even ask?”

She harumphs and hunches her shoulders. “Wanted a snack is all.”

“And you didn’t try to attack me for it?”

She growls, showing bloodied teeth. “Don’t push it, or I still might.”

He just wraps an arm around her waist and pulls her to him. She glowers but snuggles into him all the same, yawning. He wrinkles his nose slightly; bloody breath.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is the last of the stuff I had already written, anything more that I write for this fic will be added as I write it, so probably much slower than the updates up until now. I welcome feedback and suggestions!

As it turns out, the Corpus Board still hates him. Fair enough, he’s done some questionable things, but really, assassins are below them.

They can be useful when caught, however.

They’d come in threes, and when they realized they’d been cornered, two of them had done the sensible thing and shot themselves before they could give up anything valuable, but the third hesitated minutes too long and was captured alive. 

Alad, for one, is excited. He greets his prisoner smiling.

“Now I’m sure you’re wondering what’s to be done with you, yes? I wish I didn’t have to point out the obvious, but we do need to know what you know. And if you won’t give it up willingly, well…”

The man howls obscenities and is dragged by a few burly crewmen down to a hastily prepared interrogation room, large and empty but with a low, claustrophobic ceiling, and only a few dim lights in the front of the room. The far wall is in darkness, and slight clinkings and shufflings are audible. The assassin’s chucked in rather roughly, hands bound behind his back, and Alad locks the door firmly behind them, guards stationed outside. 

The man barely stays on his feet, weaponless and caught halfway between fear and anger, and Alad only smiles at him. 

“Go on then.”

The man half turns, looking warily back into the darkness. It’s empty, there’s nothing there, but— something moves in the dark, a sliding against the metal floor, and it makes his skin prickle. Alad’s smile unnerves him, and he takes a slow step back—

A sharp metal jangle, and something closes hard around his ankle. He yells and kicks out, savagely enough that it releases him, and he leaps back, stumbling, heart going like a jackrabbit in his chest.

“W-what the _fuck_ —” but oh shit it’s his monster, the bloodsucker, and it’s _here_ , and it’s _leering at him_ out of the dark.

She lunges for him and he yelps and stumbles back, but she’s caught by thick chains round her neck and limbs. She snaps her teeth, hissing, and the man behind him takes the back of his neck in hand, squeezing. 

“You see, I have, heh, ways of persuading you to tell me what you know. My pet is _hungry_ , yes, and trust me, you do not want to die at her hands.” 

The creature in question grins at him, red eyes visible through the dark. “I mean personally I’d rather you stay quiet, means I get to take more chunks out of you.”

The assassin shudders, Alad’s hand cold on his neck. “So then… are you ready to share with us?”

He grits his teeth, steeling his resolve. “I-I won’t! You’re a monster and Frohd Bek will find you eventually, the Tenno will come for you! You won’t last long out here!”

Alad’s grip tightens, the corner of his mouth twitching. “Hm. Shame, neither will you.”

He shoves the assassin forward, off balance, bending him down towards his beast, and her teeth snap like a bear trap centimeters from his throat. He screams, feeling her fetid breath, and she strains against her bonds, trying to reach him. 

“Come on, he’s not gonna spill, just lemme have him already,” she practically whines, razor teeth bared. Alad clicks his tongue. “Now now, be patient my dear, perhaps he can be… persuaded, yes.”

He’s sweating with fear now, trembling; he’s, he’s just meat to them, both of them, they’re both monsters! There’s no mercy here.

“Please! Please please please, don’t do this!”

“This is in your hands, traitor. You know how to free yourself from this. Just… tell me… what Frohd Bek knows.”

The man quivers, trying not to topple over, unbalanced as he is. “W-we weren’t told the whole plan! No one knows everything, that’s just common sense.” He yelps as he’s tipped an inch closer. “He knows where you were but not where you are now!”

Alad’s voice is soft, almost coaxing. “Come now, there must be more than that.”

“N-nothing! He just wants you dead, whatever state you’re in! But, but! I know something else!” he shrieks as the monster’s tongue stretches out to his skin. 

“Is that so? What could you possibly have to interest me with that doesn’t concern Frohd Bek?”

He gulps. “Th-the Sentients…”

The hand on the back of his neck is firm, unyielding. “…go on.”

“I tell you this, a-and you let me go, right?”

“Hm, yes, fine.”

“The Grineer found something, no one knows what, but it’s older than the Orokin and it looks… Sentient.”

His eyes are glimmering now, prickling with interest. “Now that is intriguing. Where is this artifact?”

The assassin gulps, grasping onto hope. “Uranus, i-in the caves. They, they don’t know what they have, they haven’t even made the connection to the Sentients.”

“Hmm. And are the Board planning to interfere?”

“N-no, not that I’ve heard. That’s all I have, please…”

“Good, good…” He eases up a bit, lessening the pressure on the man’s neck slightly, and the air rushes out of him in relief. The bloodsucker watches them, eerily quiet, and all he wants to do is get _away from that thing_. 

“That’s all, r-right? I… I can go?”

“Ah, what? Oh, right. Hm… no.”

He delivers a sharp shove, toppling the man forward, and his monster gives a delighted squeal and collides with him in midair, claws stabbing in through his suit and he hits the floor hard, screaming.

“NO! No, you promised!”

Alad watches almost impassively as his beast sinks her teeth into the assassin’s shoulder, shredding his suit. “I lied.”

He thrashes and screams in agony as she rips into his abdomen, but his arms are still bound behind his back and he’s but so much meat before her; she shoves one hand up into his chest cavity, under his ribs, holding him down with her other hand on his throat, compressing his screams into reedy wails. 

Alad watches his pet disembowel the former assassin, glutting herself on his blood, with a strange, unconscious smile on his face. She turns his throat to lace, yanking out his liver to suck dry, and fishing around in his chest cavity until she pulls his heart free and crunches into it like an apple. He remembers watching her do this a few times before, remembers feeling frightened and disgusted then, afraid of what she could do.

Not anymore, no.

For reasons he doesn’t really want to examine, those aversions have become something like pride, and a vicious sort of pleasure. Perhaps he’s more secure now, in knowing that they are no longer enemies. Or perhaps his time under the Infestation has just made him more sadistic. He doesn’t feel like introspection right now; he just enjoys the show. 

Eventually she stretches, stands, and shrugs off the chains; they were draped in such a way that pressure at one angle pulled them taut, but when given slack they’re easily unwound. A neat solution to her aversion to being properly bound. She’s smeared all over with blood and yawns hugely, well satisfied, and he smiles and steps forward, reaching for her bloodied face.

She grins lazily and kisses his gloved palm. “Mmm yeah, that was good.”

“I am very pleased with this, yes.” He takes out a handkerchief and starts cleaning off her face, wiping most of the blood away, and she rolls her eyes but endures it. “Not entirely what I was expecting from him, but the Sentients… my my, those are ancient history.”

She kisses him once her mouth’s clean enough for his tastes, nibbling his lips lightly. “Tell me about them later.”

“Oh? And what’s happening now, then?”

She slides her arms around his waist, under his coat. “I’m gonna get cleaned up, and then we’re gonna cuddle for like two hours.”

“Mm. I take it you have no objections to being an interrogation device in the future?”

She laughs, teeth still filmed red. “Fuck no, this was awesome. Fear’s an excellent seasoning you know.”

He hasn’t the decency to look surprised.

———————

In truth, cuddling seems to have been a ruse. She takes a quick shower to scrub off most of the gore while he makes some arrangements and readies himself for bed, and then she practically drags him in with her. She drapes herself over him, nuzzling his chest and collarbone, and he wraps his arms around her boney torso, a bit overwhelmed by her intensity.

She makes that raspy purring noise again, hands sliding down his thinly protected sides, and he flushes slightly, body still unused to being touched. She seems to try to cover his body with her own, a not unreasonable task considering their similarities in size, and she’s almost warm against his skin, the dead assassin’s blood in her veins. When she kisses him her mouth is warm and wet and inviting, and it makes the blood rush to his face, and… other places. 

She winds her tongue around his, stupidly long thing that it is, and he scrapes his blunt teeth against it, fingers splayed against her ribs. She rubs up against him and he gasps, tingling sharply, and she grins and does it again, rolling her hips against his pelvis. He swallows a keen, feeling himself firm between their abdomens, and he covers his eyes with his forearm in mortification. 

She actually laughs and pries his arm away. “Oh my god this is precious.”

He groans, squeezing his eyes shut. “I should have known you would, nnh, try something… like this…”

“Oh come on, you know you like it. Haven’t you missed me?”

“I— our previous liaisons notwithstanding, this is… I, nng, oh, do that again…”

She grins, evily, and rolls her hips, grinding against his dick, and he arches into her, stifling a moan.

“Do you want me to ride you?”

He nods mutely, head spinning.

“Say it.”

He swallows thickly, face burning with humiliation and need. “P-please, pet, ride me, hnng… use me…”

She makes a sound almost like one of her predatory growls and strips them both of underthings, somehow not ripping them, and when she sinks down onto him he can’t stop himself from crying out, arching up into her. _Fuck_ , she feels so _good_ , sensation throbs through him and his head swims from the intensity of it. 

She’s crouched over him, hands braced on either side of his ribs, and she shudders in pleasure. Her hips rock slowly, building into a steady up-and-down motion that leaves him gasping for breath. The kissing doesn’t help; she kisses him aggressively, sliding her tongue into his mouth and pressing herself flush against him. 

He’s making embarrassing sounds, bucking into her sporadically, but he can’t budge her when she bears down on him, driving him into her and hissing, “ _mine_.”

He shudders, acutely aware of her power above him, and it’s all he can do to arch into her and keen. She mouths along his throat, showing restraint there, at least, and grips his ribs tightly. She’s flushed red and panting, teeth bared, and he chokes out, “y-you can… just a little…” because this is a reciprocal relationship dammit, and he has to give before he can take. 

She groans gutturally and pricks her teeth into his skin, just enough to draw beads of blood, and laves her tongue over them, shuddering. “Fuuuuuck, you have no idea how good you taste…” She does it again, puncturing a collection of half-centimeter-deep bite marks over the joint between neck and shoulder and lapping at the beading swell, holding him so possessively he feels he might faint. Hell, he might faint anyway, the swarm of sensations building almost beyond bearing; his heart’s pounding in his chest, everything a throb and pulse as she fucks him, tastes him alive, consumes him in every way.

He comes loudly, shamelessly, and then the shame hits him upside the head and he sinks back down, limp and mortified, gasping. On top of him she quivers, back arched out and forehead pressed to his chest, shuddering around him. Then she exhales long and slow and the tension bleeds out of her like a cut artery. “Oh fuuuuuuck yessss…”

She extricates herself from him and he has to look away from the mess, cheeks still burning horribly, and she settles back down flat on top of him, arms around his ribcage. He stares up at the low ceiling, slowly coming down from the high, and drapes his arms around her. 

“This, ah… this was nice…”

She laughs into his neck, almost purring again. “Nice is a bit of an understatement, but I get your meaning.”

She sleeps against him, one ear pressed up against his heartbeat. She stops breathing sometimes when she sleeps, he’s noticed, and his hand against her back is still and unmoving.

He’s not scared of her, he’s realized, not anymore. Her power does… things, certainly, but there’s none of that blinding mortal terror that he used to feel. Her bloodlust and corpse-like body barely affect him. Familiarity doesn’t really breed contempt, not in this case, but it saps fear and uncertainty.

He wonders what he really feels now.

He’s exhausted, poured out, but he can’t stop his hand moving through her hair, examining the texture. Soft, so soft when washed properly, and grown longer so that it brushes past her shoulders. Idly, sleepily, he wonders how that works, how her hair grows regularly when the rest of her doesn’t. Wounds heal, hair grows, but nothing else changes… He’ll have to look at her cells, he thinks, yawning openly, see how active they are, if cells from ordinary skin are any different from cells from a healing wound.

He makes himself stop before he works himself up into a testing fervor and ruins his chances at sleep. He doesn’t want to move her, at any rate; she may not generate heat on her own but she does a good job of keeping his in. He’s comfortable with her slight weight on top of him, and he can feel the draw of sleep getting stronger.

He closes his eyes and allows his mind to drift.

 

—————————————————————————————————————————

 

He’s propped up against a stack of pillows, idly flicking through a report on a tablet, and she crawls into bed, divesting herself of pants. She nestles against his hip, nosing under his arm and resting her head against his abdomen, and he glances down at her.

She yawns hugely, settling one arm across his thighs, and her toes stretch and curl in the bedsheets. He switches the tablet to one hand and pets her head softly with the other, making her purr and nuzzle the sharp curve of his hip. 

He keeps reading, relaxed and comfortable, but after a few minutes she nuzzles again, angling towards his groin. He shifts slightly, but she holds him close and licks the crotch of his pajamas and he yelps. She grins lazily but he quickly slides the tablet between her and his tender bits, her nose bonking against it and leaving a smear on the screen. She looks up at him, questioning, and he groans.

“Not tonight, pet.”

“Aw come on, why not?”

Because sex exhausts him, because he’s still sore from last night in places, because he’s warm and comfortable here and he sees no reason to disrupt that. “…I’m not in the mood for, hm, shenanigans.”

She pouts her lower lip out, looking at him beseechingly. “But shenanigans are fuuuuun.”

He pets down her head and neck, trying to mollify her. “Come now, don’t you ever get tired of it?”

“Pfft no.”

“Really? Never?”

“Dude, I’m a hedonist, I never get tired of stuff that feels good.”

“Well… what else feels good? Replacing one thing with another, perhaps…”

She muses, winding her arm loosely around his waist. “Food, warm soft things… mm, kissing and cuddling, sleeping, baths… fighting and killing, yeah, but I did that all day, want something else now.” 

“Well now,” he strokes her face, other arm laying against her back, “warm soft things I can provide more easily.”

She grins lazily, stretching her legs out. “Cause you are a warm soft thing.”

He flushes slightly, almost indignant. “I-I am not, am I?”

She laughs and nuzzles his stomach, squishing it softly with one hand, making him wriggle. “Soft and squishy and full of meat.”

“That’s… hm, unsettling.”

Another laugh, and she squeezes round his middle a bit. “You’re fun to tease too, that’s another for the list.”

She scootches up beside him, rearranging him so they’re flatter on the bed, moving the pillows out of the way and draping herself half on top of him. He lays the tablet on the bedside table, laying one arm under her shoulder and the other over her side. 

She purrs, rubbing his soft cheek with hers. Her body quickly warms against his, though still a few degrees cooler on average, and she responds positively to pets and strokes and combing his fingers through her hair. She yawns and nestles up against him, tangling their legs, and nuzzles his face like an overaffectionate cat. She kisses him slowly, and he feels the points of her teeth scrape his tongue lightly. He strokes down her sides, drawing her to him, and she sighs and rests her head down.

He keeps petting her until she dozes off, and for all her sins she is lovely under his hands.

 

—————————————————————————————————————————

 

He’s wounded, and she’s howling.

They’d found him, the Acolytes, those new minions of the rogue Tenno Stalker, found him and nearly killed him before a team of Tenno and his monster had driven them off. He’s hurt badly, leaning against the hallway wall with one arm wrapped around his middle and stinging pain in a dozen places. The Tenno keep their distance now, radioing for extraction; understandable they wouldn’t want to be near him, considering their… history.

Rocket is tearing apart the crewman break room in a whirlwind of rage.

He can hear her screams from outside, amid crashes and clatters and the sounds of furniture being messily abused. The Tenno give no sign that they hear, but the sound aggravates him; he’s tired and in pain and in danger and _she needs to stop right now._

He limps to the door and shoves it open, and a chair shatters against the wall next to him. She sees him and freezes, a decorative throw pillow, one of the few luxuries in these break rooms, hanging half-shredded from her jaws. She spits it out, hissing, and covers her face. “Augh, fuck off, I can’t deal with this right now.”

He scowls, ready to complain about _his_ pains, then he sees she’s covering her nose and mouth, turning away from him. Oh. The blood.

He sighs.

“…come here.”

She bristles. “Fuck no, I’ll kill you.” It’s not a threat, just a statement of fact, laced with anxiety. He leans against the wall, one hand still putting pressure on a sluggishly oozing cut along his ribs.

“At least tell me why you saw fit to destroy another crew leisure room.”

She turns her head away, one hand flexing unconsciously. “The fuckers found us, you’re hurt.”

“That is true.”

She hisses at the floor, visibly frustrated. He takes a stab in the dark. “And we had to rely on the Tenno.”

She snarls and lashes at the wall, gouging scratches into the metal with an awful sound. “Yes!”

“You are frustrated, then, that you weren’t able to handle them on your own?”

A low, rattling hiss. “…yes.”

His face softens, a teasing thought in the back of his brain. “So I could infer, then, that your anger is rooted in your desire to protect me?”

Her jaws snap shut, blushing suddenly. “……you could. Maybe. You could do a lot of things.”

He grins despite the pain in his limbs, oddly gratified by this. He steps forward, holding out a bloodied hand. She skitters back, nostrils flaring at his scent, but he shakes his head. “Come now, I have faith in your self-restraint.” 

She grumbles but allows him to approach her, stroking her cheek with the clean part of his hand. She turns her face into it and licks at the blood smears, rumbling halfway between a purr and a growl. He kisses her forehead and starts pulling his glove off. She blinks, frowning.

“What are you doing?”

“I trust you know when to stop before I pass out?”

She gives him a look. “You serious? You’re not exactly at the peak of health right now.”

“Shush.” Another peck on her forehead. “Let me give you this.”

She grumbles but nuzzles his exposed wrist, pushing his sleeve up and nibbling further down where she wont hit any major arteries. He tries not to wince when she bites down, stroking her back as she feeds. 

It’s a shallow bite and she purrs as she drinks from him, anger soothed away. She savors it, eyes closed, so he’s the one that sees the Tenno first.

He jerks slightly, head whipping up, and she makes a startled sound and looks up as well. It’s a Saryn frame, inscrutable in its faceless helm, and he feels his face heating, as if caught in some illicit act. She blinks at it, then laughs, showing blood-smeared teeth, and showily licks them clean.

Then she turns her head and kisses him full on the mouth.

He jerks in surprise, eyes widening, but her hand snakes round the back of his neck to hold him in place and her tongue slides into his open mouth. His face feels like it’s about to catch fire, and it’s a full eternity before she releases him, leaving him gaping and beet red. She grins sideways at the Tenno and cackles as it silently turns and walks away. He sputters.

“Wh— you— don’t just… just _kiss me_ in front of the Tenno!”

She breaks down laughing, doubled over and fairly howling. He sputters ineffectually and hides his face in his hands, mortified.

“Aww that’s adorable, _now_ who’s tsundare?”

“What does that even mean!”

She won’t stop laughing till long after the Tenno have left.


	13. Chapter 13

Europa almost shines on its day side, miles of snow and ice reflecting distant sunlight back into its atmosphere. Its night side is significantly darker, but still pale and slightly shiny-looking from orbit. It’s a careful decent; they land when their target location is just past the curving line of demarcation between day and night, sneaking in when their heat signatures will be the most camouflaged. 

The small entourage of crewmen Alad brought with him unload baggage and shuffle themselves into the sprawling base, shaped like a starfish half buried in ice. Alad himself takes longer following them.

“Pet, dearest, the more time we take getting inside the colder it’s going to be! The shuttle could freeze to the ground overnight!”

“Okay so the sun is good for _one thing_ , not freezing to death! But beyond that it’s useless!”

“I don’t like this any more than you do, if you would just calm down—”

She hisses, clinging to the support struts in the ceiling of the carrier shuttle. “No! Never! I am not going out into that frozen hellscape!”

“What do you expect me to do!”

“I dunno! Make it warmer!”

He sputters and throws his mittened hands up. “You are impossible! Fine, you can stay here for all I care! The shuttle will cool down in a matter of hours anyway, not that it makes much difference.”

He turns sharply and starts to stalk out, and hears her squawk and drop down from the ceiling. “Augh fine! But you have to carry me.”

He looks back at her, incredulous. “You can’t be serious.”

She sticks out her lower lip at him. “I’m not that heavy, I need the body heat.”

He sputters but allows her to clamber up under his thick coat, draping herself over his back with her arms around his shoulders. He grumbles and hitches her legs under his arms; she was right, she’s not that heavy, but he doesn’t think he could carry her for very long at a time. Her chin hooks over his shoulder, hood pulled up against the wind, and she hisses slightly as he steps out of the shuttle and into biting air. 

The few crewmen he’d brought with him turn their helmets in his direction, faces covered but he can almost feel the odd looks he must be getting. “Say nothing,” he growls, his creature giggling over his shoulder.

It takes almost ten minutes to trudge over across broken, icy ground, and once the base door seals itself behind them he leans heavily against the wall, sucking warmer air into chilled lungs. Rocket wriggles on his back, sandwiched between him and the wall, and he rebalances his weight for a moment to let her slither down out of his coat. She slouches against the wall, yawning.

“You ought to wear a coat.”

She shakes her head stretching her legs out. “Nah, wouldn’t work. Can’t put a coat on a rock.”

He tilts his head, then gets it; she doesn’t produce heat anyway, so insulation wouldn’t be much help. “Perhaps something that generates its own heat?”

She looks up at that, interested. “If it’ll keep me from freezing solid, sure.”

He nods and files it away to tinker at later; it shouldn’t be that hard to rig up, just a few heating coils inside an ordinary parka set. Rocket stands up, yawning again. “So why are we here again?”

“There are almost no habitable bases left on this side of Europa, and this one was recently abandoned. It still has supplies we can use, and hopefully our enemies will lose our trail here.”

She cracks her neck idly. “Recently abandoned, why?”

He shrugs, uninterested. “Europa is hard to survive in, half the inhabited bases are in dire need of repair anyway. We can seal the main concourse off to keep in the heat, but most of the outer arms will have to stay open.” 

She makes a thoughtful sound, looking down the corridor to either side. She rubs at her nose, face still numb from the cold. Alad trudges down towards the center part of the base, to lay claim to a sleeping and work space, and to oversee the work to make the place habitable long term.

When he returns to the space he’d claimed as his living quarters over an hour later, he finds Rocket already sprawled on the meager bed, fiddling with something metal and shiny. She grins when he comes in, head popping up excitedly. “Finally! Thought you’d never be done, get over here.”

He sheds his outer jacket, pleased to find the heat already working and warming the room slightly. “What is that?”

She sits up, stretching her spine. “New toy, been aaaaaages on that shuttle, couldn’t do anything fun. Come on, pants off!”

He almost reflexively shields his crotch, instantly wary. “…what is that.”

“Uuugh you’ve gotta make this difficult don’t you. It’s not gonna hurt you, just a dick harness!”

He almost squeaks, ears getting hot. “I don’t think your priorities are in order here.”

She blows a raspberry at him. “Listen do you wanna warm up or not?”

That… actually makes him consider it. Mmf, fine, one roll in the metaphorical hay and then he’ll sleep for a week, or until the heating element breaks again and he’s left frozen in his bed. He grumbles and starts disrobing, Rocket bouncing up and down on the bed in glee.

It takes uncountable, uncomfortable minutes of fondling his junk and cold metal making him jerk away before the thing is settled properly, the ring almost too tight around his dick and a hook reaching back and ending in a solid bulb in his ass. He’s half hard just from her manhandling and he can’t move without feeling the plug, and it’s not that much of a stretch but it keeps brushing against his prostate and it makes him squirm more, heat rising in his face. 

“Is this really, nng, necessary?”

She grins at him, thumbing his inner thigh. “Yes! Been wanting to try this for aaaaages.” She stretches and pulls him down so he’s bent double on his knees. 

He swallows when she flops back on her back, legs spread. “Where did you even get something like this?”

“Oh, you know.” She hooks her legs around his shoulders, pulling him down to her hips. “Places.”

He gives her crotch a look. “It was Darvo wasn’t it.”

She cackles, wriggling happily. “You should see the shit he’s got! I had to restrain myself to only getting one, you know, you should be proud of me.”

He elects not to comment, instead nuzzling her pelvis in the way she likes and stroking her hips. She purrs and stretches out, rocking into it when he spreads her folds to lick at her clit. He laps at the little nub, dipping down to nibble lightly and make her let out appreciative noises. It’s hard to find a position that doesn’t have the plug end of the hook digging into some sensitive part of his rectum, and it makes him uncomfortably warm under his skin. Rocket’s got her legs around his torso and he keeps at it, watching her squirm. She reaches down and strokes his face lightly, grinning, and he sucks at her clit hard enough to make her moan. He does it again and she jerks, suddenly pushing his head back and warmer than she had been. “Not yet, not yet.”

She rolls over onto her stomach, waggling her ass at him. He blinks at her; her digestive system works differently, yes, but he’s still not keen on putting his mouth _there_ yet. She rolls her eyes at his expression. “With your _dick_ , stupid. And not my ass, there’s nothing there for me.”

He blanches. “What, with this thing on?”

Cruelly, she grinds her ass into his pelvis, making him stifle a groan. “It doesn’t get in the way, I made sure of it.”

He swallows, aching sharply, and strokes up her back. His hips rock into her, rubbing his dick along her labia and making the metal bulb in his ass grind slightly, and his mind goes temporarily blank and hazy. Oh, _yes_ , he wants this.

She arches under him when he pushes in, rocking back against him. The metal ring doesn’t hinder him much, and he shudders at the pressure inside. She moves around him, quivering and rippling, the friction driving him mad. He breathes roughly, mouth open, and pulls back to thrust, making her squirm and moan. He puts a hand between her shoulder blades and presses down slowly, making her spine arch under him.

He can feel the way her innards react to him, feel the shift and slide of organs around his dick, and even though there’s nothing seriously improper about this it makes him shiver, makes him want to see for himself what he’s doing to her flesh. Maybe they could do this again on an operating table, with her guts open for him to see.

The slide and press of the hook part of the harness is muddying his faculties too, an extra bit of stimulation to keep him occupied in moving his hips back and forth. He’s a mess, and she writhes below him, pushing her ass up so that he’s forced to rise on his knees over her to keep up. She moans and swears, squirming more, “come on, you can do better than that.”

His jaw tenses for a moment and he leans forward, hand on her shoulder blades sliding forward to press on the back of her neck, making her grin and pant. He snaps his hips roughly to watch her grin slide into a gasping O. His other hand strokes her hip, enjoying the feel of her skin. 

But she won’t stop moving, writhing and almost bucking, so he presses himself down, snaking an arm under and around her chest to press her back flush to him, groping at a breast as he does so. She groans, panting and rocking into him, and she flutters around him in a way that must mean she’s close. He grunts and drives into her roughly and she clenches, making a strangled sound. He keeps thrusting, because he’s so close he pulses with it, throbbing almost to the point of pain, but, but—

He can’t, it won’t go any further, he’s just stuck on the knife’s edge, the metal ring painfully tight, and he keens when she slumps back down, leaving him suddenly cold and damp, bereft. She stretches languidly, oblivious, and his hands frantically go for his dick, desperate. 

Quicker than his fogged mind can react to, she twists around and grabs his wrists, pinning them to the bedspread. “Nuh-uh, not yet.”

He can’t stop himself from whining, “I have to, I n-need—”

She’s pure evil and she licks a stripe up his chest, making him shudder something awful when she gets to his neck, nibbling horridly. He pants, jerking his hips to keep the friction going in his ass, and brushing his dick against the bedspread. 

She bites him so hard he almost faints. One of his hands is freed so she can stroke his face, drawing thickly at his neck, and the free hand fumbles at his genitals for sensation. He groans, vision swimming with pain and pleasure. “P..please, Rocket… don’t leave m-me like this…”

She pulls her teeth out, licking slowly at the wound. “As if I would.” She pushes him down to his back suddenly, the movement jostling the plug and making him gasp. “Just beg.”

His throat closes up as she licks at the head of his cock, swollen and throbbing. Fuck, there’s still blood in her mouth. “Please, fffhnn _please_ , for profit’s sake, I’ll die if I don’t—”

Oh, fuck, she’s sliding down. Her tongue slides around his cock serpentine, heat of her mouth following and making him moan out loud. His hands move to cover his face, to feel himself, something, but she grabs hold of his wrists again and pins them to the bed near his hips, arms stretched tight. He writhes, legs kicking sporadically, electrified and aching; he’s too exposed, like this, face and eyes open to the air and she’s _watching him_ as she sucks him off, without even the decency to close her eyes, she _knows_ what she’s doing to him and it’s too much, he can’t breathe. His voice stutters and moans, pleas devolving into guttural noises and a litany of _please, please, please…_

Then, quick enough that he doesn’t register the movement, she lets go of his wrist and finds the catch below the harness ring, and at the same moment she thrusts her mouth down over his cock, nose pressed to his pelvis and she _swallows_ , hard, and his whole body ignites, pouring out of him in heat and sound and one long spasming rush that leaves him empty and hollowed out and seared with ecstasy. 

When he can see straight again, she’s got the harness off him finally, and is twirling it around her finger with a shit-eating grin, oh so satisfied. He hasn’t the energy to groan. 

“So was I right or was I right?”

His expression must be something, because it makes her laugh and sprawl over him, boneless and loose. He aches, still, but it’s a very different kind of soreness, tired and overworked and tender. He could pass out here and not wake up for a week.

She tries to get comfortable on top of him and he groans and shoves at her weakly. “Go wash your hands, that thing’s filthy.”

She complains but goes to clean herself in the attached bathroom, and after a moment of convincing his limbs to move he follows and does the same. The water runs cold, and it chills his hands and nethers, but the activity has warmed his blood, and the heating systems are holding. He can barely stay on his feet, he’s so exhausted.

The bed, though standard issue and stiff, feels like a godsend. He’s asleep within minutes, his pet lying half on top of him, nestled into his side.

 

——————————————

 

The heat shuts off twice in the night, and when he finally wakes up to a chilly base the crew have started hammering unused mattresses to walls and stuffing fabric scraps in cracks and crevices in an attempt to insulate the structure further. There’s worse news: the storerooms of the base are emptier than he’d anticipated, plenty of fuel and tech but not a crumb of food. All they’ve got to eat is what they brought with them, which isn’t much. Alad scowls and grumbles and quickly appropriates a not-inconsiderable amount of the supplies that are left to them. Crewmen are all but disposable, and being charitable never got him anywhere. He orders a hunting party to seek out whatever edible animals manage to survive on this hellscape of a planet. Not that he’s seen any, but there must be some, surely.

His creature sleeps until a good ways into the day cycle, which is a loop of twenty five hours of day and twenty seven hours of night. Europa spins slowly. She stretches and prowls around, familiarizing herself with the base structure, and loudly vowing to never go outside this place ever again.

Alad’s not worried about her. If all else fails, she can eat the crew, and then they can leave and find somewhere else to go. This place was never meant to be permanent. What he is worried about, though, is having enough rations to stay here until the Grineer and whoever else is interested in them gets bored or loses the trail. They’d need weeks or even months, and from the looks of things they’re going to have trouble lasting a few Europan days.

Their other enemy, aside from ration anxiety, is boredom. Crushing, endless boredom. Even that first day stretches on into infinity, dull and pale grey and with a fat load of nothing to do. For lack of anything to occupy his mind, Alad sleeps. Then he wakes up and paces. Then he resorts to taking a box of random robotics parts and puzzling them together into something halfway functional. It’s been eighteen hours and he’s going mad.

At the start of the nineteenth hour of the day, the hunting party comes back. Or, rather, a single member of the hunting party comes back, and he lunges at the guard who lets him in, trying to cave in his helmet with a chunk of ice.


	14. Chapter 14

The man is brought down with a plasma shot to the head and Alad orders the body brought down to one of the lower level labs. There’s no sign of the rest of the group; there had been four sent out, with a MOA robot for security, and there’s blood on the corpse’s clothes and face. He’s curious about the story there, and desperate for something to do anyway. Rocket blinks at it owlishly from over his shoulder, frowning. “Smells like meat.”

“Of course it does, it _is_ meat.” 

She shakes her head, mouth turned down in a frown. “No, like _rancid_ meat, stale.” She looks at him. “This isn’t appetizing.”

His brow furrows. She’s only turned down flesh or blood when it’s contaminated or rotten. The man hadn’t been dead long enough for decay to set in, and even if he had, the freezing conditions outside would preserve him for months. Was he sick, before? Some illness that struck while they were out in the wastes? Or something the man had carried with him on the shuttle? And if that was the case, were the rest of them in danger?

He has Rocket haul the man onto a makeshift operating table and cut off his outer jumpsuit. Underneath he’s pale, fingers scabbed and mouth raw and bloody. 

Rocket leans on her elbows on the table. “Far be it for me to complain about seeing guts, but why exactly are we cutting this guy open? Think we’re gonna find parasites or something?”

“I’m not sure, and our means of diagnosis are limited here. Autopsy at least lets us see inside, if there are any symptoms of illness, or, as you say, evidence of parasites.”

She hrrms and eyes the body as he makes the initial incision, expression vaguely suspicious. Alad’s mind is puzzling away at the evidence before him, excited by this new source of mental stimulation; he sent out four men and one returned, covered in blood but with no visible wounds, violent and seemingly incapable of coherent language before he was killed. He can assume the rest of the group are dead, unless contradicting evidence presents itself, and it’s likely that it’s their blood this man was covered in, unless they were attacked, in which case it’s anyone’s guess if it was his comrades’ blood or his attackers’.

He has no evidence pointing towards this, but he strongly suspects this man killed at least one person out there. 

As excited as he is to see something unusual inside the man’s body, he’s rather disappointed to find nothing of the sort. Ordinary physiology, ordinary innards, ordinary flesh. He almost pouts.

It’s his habit to save the digestive system for last, due to the smells and general unpleasantness that comes with opening those up. Wearily, he sticks the stomach sac with his scalpel and slices it open lengthwise, and finds it full of red meaty chunks. He blinks, surprised. Standard rations for crewmen rarely contain meat, and when chunked protein is involved it’s usually brown and smothered in more brown for flavor. This mess looks almost raw.

Rocket reaches in from the other side of the table, plucks out a half-chewed chunk, and pops it into her own mouth.

“Wh— don’t do that, you don’t know where that’s been!”

She chews once, then makes a face and spits it out. “I know where it’s been, it’s been in that guy, that’s why it tastes gross. It’s all stomach acid on the outside.”

He makes a disgusted face, but she’s got more to say. “But I’ll tell you one thing, it’s human.”

“Pardon?”

She gestures at the mess in the man’s gut. “He ate human meat.”

He blinks, stares. That’s…. what. “Are you sure?”

Her expression turns sardonic. “I could pick out human gibblets in a smoothie of sixteen different animals, yes I’m sure.”

Colorful imagery aside, this is… certainly interesting. So their raving crewman turned cannibal out there. Alad tilts his head, frowning at the corpse. Why? He hadn’t exactly known the man very well, he’d ignored him as much as he did the rest of the crew, they were practically interchangeable. He doesn’t even remember his name, if he’d ever heard it in the first place. But surely he’d have noticed a cannibal tendency, or else Rocket would have. So this had to be a recent development. 

What on earth had happened out there?

Well, regardless, this has to be kept secret now. Lord knows what the rest of the crew would do if they knew their deceased comrade had eaten his fellows. They’re used to Rocket, sort of, but this… 

He shakes his head and busies himself in stowing the body in a containment case — a moderately high-tech body bag with too many fiddly dials and a decent lock — and ordering it stashed in a cold room packed with snow.

(One of the benefits of life on an ice planet is that all you need to do to freeze your food or corpses for preservation is section off a wing of your base to be unheated, and just stick whatever you want in there with a few chunks of ice from outside.)

By this point the sun is setting very, very slowly, and there’s murmurs of sending out a search party for the other three crewmen, but Alad ignores them and nothing comes of it. Desire to not be outside at night with whatever might have done away with those three men overruled whatever level of companionship they felt towards them. In the shrewdest of estimates, it was four fewer mouths to feed.

Alad doesn’t sleep. How can he sleep? He’s been starved for mental stimulation for what feels like days (“Hours, you lunatic, it’s been _hours_ , calm down.”) and this is _intriguing_. His mind won’t let go of it.

But he also has no new evidence, aside from the cannibal revelation. So the dead man had eaten a large quantity of raw human meat, presumably of his own free will, and presumably from the bodies of his comrades. Presumably, he’d also killed them. Presumably.

But none of that tells him _why_ , what possible motivation the man could have had. Sudden onset madness? A long repressed psychosis? A previously unknown disease? Every illness that causes cannibalistic urges that Alad knows of — and there aren’t many — comes with a laundry list of other symptoms, and they all have a clear progression across multiple days; he doesn’t pay much attention to his crew, yes, but surely he wouldn’t have missed excessive vomiting or sudden onset dementia. No this has to be something new. Which means it’s something dangerous.

He sighs, brow furrowed. He’ll have to keep a closer eye on the remaining crew, in case whatever this is is contagious. 

Rocket’s lying on the bed, waving her arms at him vaguely. He looks at her. “Pet, you’ll need to pay attention in case this happens again, if any of the crew start going after each other I want you to intervene.”

She pouts, arms flopping down. “Not like I coulda stopped it from happening the first time, I wasn’t even there.”

He sits down next to her, resting a hand on her stomach and tisking softly. “I didn’t mean it like that dearest. Only you’re here now, and if we can catch this thing when it’s affecting a live human, we may be able to learn more about it. And,” he adds, stroking softly, “if it turns out I’m in danger, I’ll need you alert and on guard.”

She stretches out, scootching into him a bit. “Good.”

“Good?”

“Good.”

 

————————————

 

The base is equipped with a proximity alarm and a few watch towers, but since there’s only about half a dozen crew to man the place, and this side of the planet is virtually uninhabited, it hardly seems worth the trouble to put actual people up there. It was decided by unanimous vote that Shin Aalver would be the lucky watchman for the night, ostensibly to keep watch for any more surviving hunter scouts, but mostly to stop him telling obnoxious ghost stories all through dinner.

Whatever. Gives him more time to think up new stuff to scare them with. They’re too used to gore is the problem, with the bloodsucker around, he’s gotta work hard to get the reactions he wants. 

He’s scribbling in a paper notebook — how vintage! — when something on the horizon catches his eye. He cranes his neck to look, blinking at it. Tall and spindly, hard to see in the fading light, even harder to tell if it’s moving. He frowns further, pulling the end of the tower’s periscope in front of his eyes, trying to focus in on it.

There, that’s better. Yeah, that is… definitely moving. Slowly, long strides over the broken ice, silhouetted against the yellow-white horizon. His mouth opens, shaping the words “what the…” Its proportions are all wrong, way too much limb for anything human. It’s too tall, too skinny. And its head is shaped weird…

He blinks, shakes his head, and snaps a quick video feed to send down to the boss. He gives the orders here, it’s not Shin’s responsibility to do anything about it yet. Just log it and move on. The weird elongation can be explained away as an illusion, like a cold mirage or something. Whatever it is is far enough away that it won’t be getting here any time soon, anyway. 

Night is enormously long and terrifyingly dark, with the base’s floodlights only reaching a dozen or so meters into the blackness. It’s as endless as the day was, with only a low undercurrent of anxiety for flavor; the darkness always trips some minor alarm bells in the human hindbrain, they were never meant to exist in the night. Only Rocket is unafraid of what is or isn’t out there. Night is home, after all. 

Only, when the sun shows itself again eons later, the spindly thing Shin reported on the previous evening is much, much closer. 

As in, it’s within fifty feet of the base.

As it turns out, its limbs were not an effect of distance or air distortion, they really are that lengthy and thin. Its whole body is stretched and skinny, ashy black against the sparkling snow. Its head is hugely misshapen, pushed forward and jagged, and wearing a crown of antler-looking protrusions. It breathes; clouds of steam rise periodically from what must be a mouth. 

Alad’s first reaction is to send Rocket out at it. Rocket’s reaction to that is a firm “hell fucking no, I like my face pristine and un-barbecued thanks.”

The backup plan is to cluster the crew around him, guns drawn, and attempt to investigate from inside the base.

As his creature is happy to announce, this is not the best backup plan he could have had. 

He waves one hand at her in a shushing gesture, a tablet in his other hand showing a feed from the recently reactivated security cameras pointed at the front entrance. The beast is there, eerily featureless even though it’s so close; just dusty black skin, like it’s been charred, almost devoid of flesh, emaciated. Alad can see a ribcage clearly visible under the skin, and he swallows thickly. He doesn’t know what this thing is, and his pet monster is no use unless they can lure it inside where the sun can’t reach, and he’s understandably hesitant to do that. Its hands end in long claws, dragging in the snow. 

Claws that it now raises, impossibly long arm bending once in the middle, then again at the stick-thin wrist, and scratches at the door. A crewman startles back at the sound and his neighbor kicks him in the ankle. Alad swallows.

“Open the door, fire, then close it straight away.”

The crew turn their heads at each other, helmeted but succeeding in passing the universal “well I’m not going to do it” look between them. The crewman closest to the door moves cautiously for the controls, and activates them.

Seeing the whatever it is on screen is one thing. Seeing it looming in person, head several feet above the top of the doorway, spindly black limbs stretching on forever, is quite another.

It’s a fraction of a second that feels like an eternity before they fire.

A second later the door slams shut again and the men are doubled over from the _sound_ the thing made, harsh and screeching and so high pitched it’s like it bypasses the ears and goes straight for the brain, and then the pain hits, immense and cavernous and three of them feel like vomiting even though their stomachs are suddenly sucking in on themselves and _this was a mistake._

Alad feels it too, bent over and clutching at his stomach, gasping, wide-eyed. The pain brings back horrible memories of the time, months ago (years? was it years?) when Rocket had fed him her blood, made him feel what she felt, her hunger and need. He turns pale green with nausea.

But he can’t dwell on it, Rocket’s yelling. Yelling and careening into the group of crewmen, hollering at them to “get away, get away! Scatter you asswipes, you can’t be near it!” And they run, shaken and disoriented by sound and pain, they vanish down both ends of the hallway. She howls and her hands spasm and she’s _angry_ , why is she angry, what the hell.

“Oh I’m an _idiot_! I’m a fucking idiot I shouldn’t even be _alive_ , why the fuck didn’t I notice it!”

Alad tries to speak, coughs at the dryness in his throat, tries again. “What the hell are you talking about?” 

She hisses, posture tense and arching. “I know what this is.” She kicks the door so violently it shudders in its housing. “I know what you are you great horned asshole! Dick shitting assmunching Bambi’s mom motherfucker! Of fucking course you’d show up on a goddamn ice planet where it’s! Always! Winter!” She punctuates this tirade with another series of furious kicks, denting the door and howling in anger. 

Alad stares. He blinks. He swallows again and forces his hand to move away from his stomach, the cramping already fading. “Explain." 

Air hisses through her teeth again, eyes narrowed and angry. “It’s a wendigo.”

“A what?”

“A fucking demon, like the Jersey Devil but worse, the Jersey Devil’s at least got manners, sometimes, these fuckers are a goddam plague.”

“You’re going to need to start speaking sense again.”

She gestures staccato, frustrated, then forces her eyes shut and speaks a moment later. “They appear during lean winters, years with shitty harvests and bad hunts, when food’s already scarce and getting scarcer. They’re starvation and cold personified, and first problem is they’re attracted to desperation where there already is some, and second is they cause more of it. That thing that just happened? That’s what they do, they cause hunger and break community bonds and they make you eat each other.”

His eyes widen, making the connection. “So that crewman that came back…”

She nods, uncharacteristically grim. “They must have encountered it out in the wastes, it must have done something to him. You saw how he was, not a mark on him, that wasn’t a guy who’d been in a fight. That was a guy who ambushed his teammates and got them unawares.”

There’s a hissing, crackling sound, like creaking metal or lake ice, from the other side of the dented door, and Rocket hisses back, lips drawn back, fangs displayed at nothing. It scratches again, then makes a sound eerily like laughter, and she swears viciously at it for four whole minutes. 

He leans against the opposite wall, waiting for her to run out of air. “How do we kill it?”

Her spine goes soft, slumping in place. “That’s the thing, I don’t know.”

“What?”

“I encountered one once! And I didn’t exactly stick around to see how it ended, most of the stories finish with whole villages wiped out from cannibalism and blizzards. This place is probably as good as haunted now, cursed or something.” 

He groans, rubbing his face. “That can’t be true…”

She shakes her head, mouth a thin line. “I dunno what to tell you.”

“Can it get in here?”

“Probably not, they’re supposed to be pretty weak physically. Their thing isn’t hurting people directly, it’s making people hurt each other. And I mean, it’s not like anyone here is that great a danger to us. Can’t exactly fly a shuttle with two people, but we probably won’t be the ones dying.”

“Until we run out of food.”

“Well. Yes. There is that.”

He pushes himself off the wall, still shaken. “In any case, if you’re right that it can’t get in here unless we let it, then we’ve got time to plan.”

She follows him, visibly anxious now; she scratches at her arms and tilts her head at sounds he can barely hear, face tight. He retreats to his room in the middle of the compound, and orders the crew to stay as far away from the outer sections as possible, and preferably to keep their distance from each other as well. He confiscates the remaining rations and takes charge of distributing them, not trusting any of the others to do it properly with the thing outside radiating hunger into them.

Rocket won’t sit still. She’s antsy, or hungry, or bored, or all three, and she clambers over him while he’s trying to figure out their plan of action, draping herself over his back and complaining.

“Come ooooooon, it’s not gonna get in here any time soon, and if I don’t do something I’m gonna start pulling my hair out.”

He glowers at the screen he’s tapping at, trying to shrug her off. “So go do whatever it is to someone else, or sleep. The sun is out, that’s usually your sign to drop unconscious.” 

“Time isn’t real, you know that. And no one else will entertain me here, they’re scared boring.”

He turns to glare at her properly and, surprisingly, she moves back from him, as if startled. Memories of old suffering are sharp in his mind, up against this new wendigo threat, and it makes him harsh and impulsive. “Do not bother me right now, do you understand? If you can kill that thing, be my guest. If you can’t, stay out of my way so that maybe we can get out of here alive.”

She stares for a moment, then turns and bounds off the bed without a word. Her expression, in the second he had to see it, is not one he recognizes. He shakes his head, turning back to his tablet; he’s got no patience for her badgering today. 

She lopes, pacing down featureless halls and glowering at nothing, claws leaving thin white scratches on the metal walls and floors. She’s not used to that from him, not now. It makes her… something. She doesn’t know, it doesn’t feel right. She growls and shakes her head and keeps walking, only stopping when a blast of freezing air makes her stop and hiss. The outer hallways of the compound have occasional windows paned with insulated glass; one of the panes on the window opposite her has been broken, letting icy air in. That side of the building is in shadow, no direct sunlight to alert her. It’s weak here, anyway, so far from the center of the solar system, it would take a while to eat through her skin. 

Her lip curls and she lashes out, kicking the metal wall hard. She hisses again at the pain in her foot, hands clenching, but a sound makes her stop; scritching, scratching, from outside the window.

There’s a shadow of a long, clawed hand moving across the frosted outside of the glass.

She snarls and skitters back, bristling, and the long claws scritch and prod at the missing pane, fitting two fingers inside, but the hole is too small for its whole hand, and the long bony fingers retreat, to be replaced with a black, hollow eye socket. She shows her teeth at it, a low growl rattling her throat. “Fuck off.”

It stares — as well as something with empty oculars can — and she hisses. “You’re fucking annoying, you know that? Ruining a perfectly good vacation to Hell Planet: Ice Edition. I don’t need this! No one needs this! And you’re shoving in on my turf here! Eating people is my gig, I don’t need you making these morons eat each other.”

She runs out of words, seething, and she’s gearing up for another shout when a rattling hiss sounds from outside. “You are… too… loud…” 

Her expression widens in surprise. “Oh, I’m so fucking sorry! Is my yelling disturbing your language lessons? Since when can you things talk?”

Its voice is a raspy croak, burnt and dry like the rest of it. “Many languages… we call their names, they come, they eat… you are wasteful…”

She sneers at it through the empty pane. “Oh stuff it, you’re a half eaten deer head with yaoi hands, you don’t get to talk.”

“Your… human…”

She scoffs. “I am not, you blind?”

“The human… belonging to you…”

At that she stiffens. “What about him.”

It huffs a laugh, breath steaming. “Your claim is not… absolute… bloodsucker.”

She lunges across the hall, snarling fit to kill, and sticks her arm out the missing pane, slashing at it. The wendigo moves back, but too slow; she grabs hold of its forearm, scarcely thicker than her own skinny wrists, despite its height, and it brays loudly. She grins savagely and tightens her grip, twisting, and is rewarded with a sharp snap and a screech of pain. Her existing peckishness spikes into full hunger, but she hardly notices it, the feeling so familiar it fades into the background under anger and vindictive urges.

She releases the thing’s arm, brittle bones crushed and broken badly, and hisses out the window at it. “Fucking try it asshole, see where it gets you.”

The thing retreats, breath billowing in the freezing air, and Rocket pulls her arm back into the warmer space of the hallway, flexing her fingers and blinking a fog of light out of her eyes. Anger; hunger; anxiety; resentment. Loneliness.

She blows out a long breath and forces herself to start walking again, towards the warmer center of the compound. She’ll badger someone into fixing that window, then find somewhere to sleep. Maybe catch a snack, she doesn’t know.


	15. Chapter 15

The good news is that in the time they’ve been here, perhaps even starting while they were en route, the Grineer have found something else to occupy their attention. Some gladiatorial bloodsport they seem to think is a justice system. They’ve pulled back their scouts and devoted their efforts elsewhere, at any rate.

The bad news is everything else. He’s run the numbers a dozen times over, and each time they come up depressing; they’d need to leave immediately to have any chance of making it back to civilization, six crewmen is barely enough to operate the shuttle they came in. There’s a single skiff in the base that could run on a crew of two or three, but it’s so small it would be an incredibly risky move trying to fly it back to anywhere reasonable. But the longer they stay here, the more will die. And there’s no guarantee this isn’t some kind of sickness they would bring with them; he can’t be sure the wendigo wouldn’t just follow somehow.

His stomach growls. Cramps.

He grinds his teeth together and paces, thoughts continually turning back to food. He can’t escape it, the rations he allows himself hardly do anything to dull the emptiness, and he craves meat with an intensity he can’t explain.

It’s the old anxiety again, a fear of losing control and being subject to shameful base urges, but this time there’s anger on top of it, frustration.

He can see no way out of this that doesn’t end in the crew eating each other, and more and more that seems almost desirable. They’re not important, little more than tools to use. If they’re reduced to food for him, he could almost accept it. But he has to think long term, if he makes stupid decisions now it could very well get him killed. There aren’t enough of them to last, and when they’re gone, then what?

He blows out a breath and drags his hands down his face. He’s getting nowhere. 

He has to make a decision, quickly. He decides on evacuation.

It’s the lesser of many evils, he rationalizes as he orders the crew to start packing their meager equipment and sends one of them to warm up the shuttle. They can run elsewhere, beg shelter from the Perrin Sequence maybe, as much as he detests the idea, and pray that the wendigo doesn’t follow them. How can it, unless it sneaks on board? 

That train of thought carries him until the man he’d sent to start the shuttle returns. At least, his body returns, speared on the wendigo’s antlers like some grotesque hunting trophy. The thing huffs in the warmer air of the base, the bay doors pried open, and no one knows whether they want to run, or fight, or go for the fresh corpse so tantalizingly presented to them. 

They lose half their crew this way. 

The wendigo does not care about the flies. The wendigo is a pursuit hunter, following its target for days, weeks even, hovering on the horizon and waiting until its prey succumbs to cold or hunger or madness.

But even pursuit hunters get impatient.

This one shouldn’t have. 

Rocket cannons into it with bone-breaking force, screeching rage and tearing into its sallow chest. It bellows a retort and claws her off, throwing her into the metal floor, but she bounces back and sinks her teeth into its skinny leg, tearing at wire-strong tendons.

It shrieks and lifts its foot, swinging her around and stomping her into the floor, stunning her badly. She chokes, limbs not cooperating, and the wendigo reorients, retargets.

Alad’s sprinting, making a break for the shuttle but the snow’s up to his knees and the thing’s got such long limbs—

It reaches him in two gargantuan strides, ducks its head, and hits him like a freight train, flinging him bodily into the metal skin of the shuttle. Air rushes out of his lungs as if escaping before things get more painful, and he slides down into the snow, ears ringing from impact, barely marshaling his senses in time to see the wendigo stumble, yanked back by an iron grip on its ankle.

It screeches, fury making the air vibrate, and Alad has enough presence of mind to get his feet under him and bolt for the open hatch; the engines are steaming, almost ready. _Just stall a little longer, please…_

He scrambles up into the ship, barking orders to the two crewmen that are left to him — praying they last long enough to get them out of here — and the engines whirr louder, groaning with the stress of temperature shock on the metal. The ship rocks again, something large and bellowing impacting the hull. Alad swears and bolts for the gun locker.

The ship lurches, throwing the plasma gun from his hands and making him stumble badly; his head whips around, ready to see the thing clawing in through the hatch, but its the thrusters coming online and buoying the ship up off the ground. 

But the engines stutter, the floor dropping from under his feet, and he falls with an undignified sound, sliding back towards the rear door. A weight, hanging off the back, dragging the shuttle down; who knew skin and bones could be so heavy.

Its claws scratch grooves in the floor just inside the hatch, hind legs kicking in the air, and it bellows loud enough to make him reflexively cover his ears. Too bad the movement makes him lose traction and skid, towards those grasping claws. 

Something shoots through the hatch, scrambling for purchase on the sloped floor, but then the wendigo’s jaws close on his legs and his higher functions are whited out by agony. 

It’s one thing to be bitten by something relatively the same size as him, with a mouth of mostly normal proportions. It is quite another, he finds, to have an entire limb crunched and chewed up by something many times his own size. The pain is staggering, incomprehensible, too big to fit inside his skull, and his throat vibrates with screaming. He claws at the metal floor, fighting against gravity and the weight of the monster.

A weapon barrel swims into view, jutting past his face, and the muzzle flash blinds him; the wendigo howls, broken and keening, and its grip on him falters. His legs slip free, its claws screech against the metal, and the ship rights itself. 

His legs burn, bone-deep, and he can’t stop himself from screaming as he’s dragged away from the hatch, the hull sliding closed and cutting off the roar of the wind. There’s swearing above him, a voice speaking through a crewman helmet filter, and a rattling hiss. 

He cracks open his eyes in time to see one of his last crewmen’s neck break, the other sprinting towards the cockpit. His monster drops the body, hovering over him, naked fear on her face. 

Then the rumbling of the engines under the floor monopolize his attention, and he’s aware of nothing more. 

 

————————————————————————————————————————

 

It’s two days later when Orcus Relay’s proximity alarms notify the relay administration of an object rapidly approaching the landing bay, shortly before a very weatherbeaten shuttle crashes headlong through the doors, missing its dock, and managing to brake before obliterating the concourse past the bay. Its engines pivot and sear stripes into the walkway, straining to kill the shuttle’s velocity before dying and letting the bulk of the thing crash and skid to a smoking halt. 

The hull door, dented and warped in its frame, bursts open, vomiting smoke into the purified landing bay air. The filter fans whine in protest. A hand clears the smoke, fingers splayed, and remains there until the air clears enough to see; a monster hauling another on her back, stumbling and bracing herself on the doorframe.

A low wave of murmuring from the civilians in the crowd, the dull clunk of the bay’s emergency doors closing in the background.

Alad’s body slips, sliding out of her grip and falling heavily to the floor, making his beast yelp and scramble for him, diving down to crouch over his prostrate form. She screeches, hasty to forestall the collective reach for weapons. “Surrender!”

A pause, silent but palpably wary, and she swallows. “Surrender,” she says again, quieter; a statement, not an order. 

A Warframe — Mag, she thinks — steps forward, head tilted with a skeptical air. Rocket hisses softly. “If it was a trick don’t you think we would have tried it already? There’s no _point_ attacking these places, that Grineer bigwig’s already done a number on them, we never had to bother.” Her voice takes on a wheedling tone, plaintive. “Isn’t this _useful_ to you? I’m fucking _giving up_ , you can have us, just _fix him. Please._ ”

Blood on the Corpus man’s clothes, one leg twisted at an unnatural angle. His monster, crouched defensively, desperate, baring her throat. 

The only sounds are the creaking and settling of the wreaked shuttle, the Tenno crowd is silent. Impossible to tell what’s going on behind those helms. 

Rocket swallows, shoving down rage and desperation. Stupid _stupid_ , why did she think this would be a good idea? They’ll just separate and kill them, there’s nothing stopping them now. He’s already used up his favor, they don’t owe him anymore. It was such a fucking gamble getting him here and now it’s ruined, failed, dead end. 

She’s jolted out of her spiral by footsteps on the metal floor, and her head jerks up, startled. 

The Mag frame is closer, seeming to watch them— and it nods.

They try to take him themselves but she won’t let them, hauling his body onto her back again with little effort, and they settle for directing her. Maybe they figure the weight will prevent any suicidal ambush attempts on the way. She follows her guides silently, finally allowing Alad to be taken from her by the medical crew, with much suppressed grumbling and half-muttered threats. She doesn’t even gut anyone though, which honestly should earn her some praise, but that thought is frail against the lead ball in her stomach. 

So she sits.

And she waits.

Eventually the relay’s archival Cephalon messages to say that quarters have been cleared for her, but she declines to move. People come and try to lever her out of her seat, but she growls at them until they go away. She doesn’t snap though, doesn’t threaten. She knows how important this is. 

She doesn’t move for a day and a half. 

 

————————————

 

He registers pain.

Dull, throbbing aches all over his body, and as he focuses they sharpen, concentrating on specific points; his head feels like it’s in a vice. His stomach throbs, feeling swollen, and his legs are in simple agony. 

He doesn’t know where he is, doesn’t know what’s happened. Dimly, voices make themselves known.

“—est that you cease impeding the medical staff’s operation.”

“They’ll kill him if I’m not here.”

“You must know that is not accurate; those among the population here who would attempt to do so out of anger or distrust are few in number, and have been pacified by the consensus of many. Alad V is harmless and contained.” The voice gains a faintly stern edge. “You, on the other hand, continue to threaten the civilian population. You will not be allowed to stay if this behavior persists.”

There’s a soft, almost imperceptible sound that he realizes is teeth grinding together; she’s furious. 

Afraid, too. 

“My understanding of the mental workings of organic life is limited, but if I may ask: why do you persist in this manner?”

A pause, long enough that he almost passes out again. “He’s mine. _Mine_.” And then, softer. “What else am I good for anyway.”

“Many things,” the voice replies, in that blunt, emotionless manner. “Defense, research, field operation. I understand you have medical knowledge. Your durability would prove quite useful, if you should chose to use it in a partnership with us. And I would advise you to do so, considering that you owe us for the damages to the landing bay.”

“…you’re really not good at this are you.”

“No more so than you, honored guest.” 

She snorts rudely, fabric sliding against fabric as she shifts in her chair, slouching down. 

Alad’s consciousness slips away before she speaks again, sliding back into dreamless sleep.

 

——————————

 

When he wakes, it is violently. A heavy, wet cough starts in his chest and lurches upwards, forcing him to react or choke. He convulses, lurching onto his side in a movement that awakens pain in a dozen body parts, but he has no attention to spare for that as he hacks over the side of the bed, struggling to breathe. 

After agonizing, terrifying seconds, his efforts produce a mouthful of grey slime spat onto the floor and the first conscious breath he’s taken in a week. He stays still for a moment, gulping down eager lungfuls and nursing the ache in his throat. Feels like he inhaled Grineer alcohol, sore and burning, but he can breathe, and that’s the important part.

Something cool presses to his neck and he freezes, thinking _gun barrel_ , but his gaze twitches to the side and it’s only a sensor, feeding data from his flesh into a machine held by someone who is obviously a medic. He swallows, painful on his abused windpipe, and holds still. 

“Well?” The voice is harsh, high, and familiar, and the medic glances back, annoyed.

“No immediate complications, cognition and vitals are adequate, and no further sedation is needed. Pending test results, that is.”

Rocket makes an affirmative sound and the medic moves away from him, face carefully expressionless. He focuses on breathing, taking in the room in small doses. Bland walls, utilitarian medical equipment, a single chair looking like it was relocated from somewhere else and containing a twitchy vampire. He relaxes, slightly; no immediate danger here. 

The medic leaves, telling the room “I’ll be back in an hour,” and closing the door behind them. He thinks he hears the lock engage, which surprises him very little. He inhales slowly, moistening his tongue.

“…fill me in.”

Her tone is wheedling. “It was bad, this was the closest place I could find, you would have died otherwise. The wendigo’s gone though, it didn’t follow us.” A muscle jumps in her jaw. “I made sure of it.”

His stomach feels tight and empty. “Where are we.”

Her shoulders hunch, defensive. “Orcus Relay.”

Some piece of monitoring equipment stutters alarm. “Orcus Relay! You brought us _here_? Into the nest of the betrayers!”

She bristles. “You would have died otherwise! And that can still be arranged, if you’re feeling _picky_.” 

His jaw clenches, sending a dull throb of pain through his temples. The question is on his lips before he can stop himself. “Why didn’t you just change me?”

Her face does something painful, jaw spasming. “…would you have wanted that?”

He blinks, startled. “When have you _ever_ — no. No I wouldn’t have.”

Silence, then, for a while. Her face is pained, lips tight, and his fingers tangle slowly in the sheets covering him. Then: “I made sure they wouldn’t kill you. I made _sure_.”

He looks down at his numb form, visible under the sheets, then relaxes his neck to rest his head back. “I am not dead,” he concedes, sighing. “But what do we do now? I doubt they will just let us walk out of here, as sordid as our pasts are.”

She glares at her tangled hands. “I don’t know. Maybe fight our way out if we have to, but…” The knowledge of the manhunt that would follow hangs in the air like a bad smell.

Eventually Alad sighs and lets his eyes close. Talking has exhausted him again, and it’ll be a short nap anyway, if the medic is good on their word. He hears Rocket shifting in her chair, knows she wants to burrow close to his body heat — but she doesn’t. She stays where she is, impotently angry at too many things, and doesn’t say a word when the medic does indeed return to check him over. 

Orcus Relay. At least it’s not a complete death sentence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AAAHAHAH THIS FIC ISN'T DEAD


	16. Chapter 16

He only realizes the full extent of what’s been done to him later, after submitting to further medical ministrations. He was unconscious for the better part of a week, first out of simple bodily stress and exhaustion, and then kept in that state chemically, for ease of recovery. 

He was stripped of as much of his external hardware as possible, fed and watered intravenously, and underwent surgical repairs of as much of his damaged body as the limited resources here could manage. The old wound in his stomach had reopened internally, probably when that… thing, back on Europa, tossed him into the bulkhead. He considers it a miracle that the surgeon did not attempt to kill him on the table, though he suspects Rocket had something to do with that. 

But his legs… well. His legs.

There was no saving all of them. The medical facilities on board the relay are poorly equipped in some areas, and have no resources to spare for regrowing limbs. Although, given the reports he’s received, he’s not entirely sure the leg could have been salvaged even with top-notch care. The rot that had set in was alarming, devouring him by inches in the two days it took to arrive at Orcus Relay. And the consensus of the medical staff is that it was a… remnant, a half-dead ghost, of his time… addled. Consumed. 

_The virus is still in you_ , they said, gazes drifting towards the scarred grooves in his cheek. _We can keep it dormant, but that’s all_. So, one leg gone up to the knee, the other severed mid-shin.

But that he can live with. He can live with a lot of things, it turns out.

They outfit him with basic prosthetics, little more than sticks for walking on, and call it done. He’ll have to take matters into his own hands at some point, but priorities, priorities. They return to him what’s left of his coat, and all the tech they’d managed to remove from him; his headpiece especially, he can feel the ports itching where they’re exposed to air, in among hair that hasn't seen daylight in years, but he hasn’t the patience to reintegrate it yet. He sets it aside with the rest and accepts drab, grey civilian clothes.

He sees them eyeing his scars, both the warped, puckered flesh left over from his excision of Infested growths from his own body, and the paler rings of healed puncture marks, dotted over his torso. Fine, he thinks, let them see. Let them see that he’s suffered too.

Understandably, he is touchy about having blood drawn.

Less understandably, his monster seems to consider all his bodily fluids to be _hers_ , and kicks up a bigger fuss than he does when the medical staff comes for blood tests.

This is a fucking trial.

But she hasn’t fed from him since arriving, and he wonders where she’s been getting her meals. She doesn’t look as twitchy as she usually does after a few days without sinking her teeth into someone, but he can’t imagine she’d be stupid enough as to go marauding for civilian blood with his life in their hands. 

He almost asks her, but thinks better of it. He’s not sure he wants to know. 

 

————————————

 

It is several more days before Alad is deemed fit enough to walk, and his first few steps are bad enough that he almost rejects the prospect entirely and goes back to bed. Indeed, it surprises him that they’re letting him roam at all. If he were them, he would have chucked himself in a cell the minute he didn’t need constant life support anymore. 

But that Cephalon was right, he is feeble here, with his body near collapse and only a single, highly volatile supporter among the hundreds of civilians and Tenno on the relay. And relay administration is not stupid; he is only allowed out under guard, and of course the relay Cephalon is always watching.

He doesn’t really have much room to complain, all things considered. 

He relies heavily on a cane, now, his mutilated legs protesting and hindering him significantly. For the first few days all he can manage are short walks up and down the corridor, stopping to rest frequently, and having his weakness on display for his guard and any passers-by makes him bitter with shame. He tries not to speak much, lest his emotions get the better of him. 

Gradually, he builds strength. He can manage longer walks, gaining confidence on his rudimentary new feet. It helps to make mental plans as he walks, building schematics for a new, proper set of prosthetics. Spring-loaded heels, he thinks, maybe a variation on a MOA build. Internal gyroscopes for balance, and electromagnets for grip. The thought buoys him on, and before he realizes it he’s made it to the main concourse, and out of breath.

There are benches strewn around, and he gratefully settles onto one, amputation sites aching fiercely. His guard hovers, ever silent, but they are easy to ignore. He focuses on catching his breath, resting his hands on the head of his cane. 

The concourse is rather pleasing to look at, he thinks, once the novelty has died down. Arched supports holding up a gracefully lit ceiling, wide open walkways, a potted plant here and there. A bit bland, but he’s not going to complain about it. 

But there are… so many Tenno here. He’s never seen them like this, not fighting or fleeing or killing just… walking. Gesturing to each other in what might be a rudimentary sign language, or just standing silent and still, doing apparently nothing. There are voices, syndicate members and civilians calling to each other and talking in small groups, but the Tenno are ever silent.

And, because they are without eyes, it takes him much longer than it should to realize he is being watched.

His presence has attracted attention, helms nearby turning towards him, and by the time he’s blinked and seen them watching him there’s a substantial number focusing in on him. The pressure of their eyeless gazes makes his skin prickle, and his spine stiffens in reflexive anxiety. 

So many…

And there, standing out like accusing fingers in the crowd… Valkyr. Several of the model, colors and adornments different but all so familiar, intimately familiar, _he knows what they look like on the inside._

It is them in particular that have locked onto him, and his stomach tightens when one of their number steps forward. A furtive glance at his guard confirms his fears; the soldier on loan from Steel Meridian is not here to protect him, only to protect others from him. Hah! As if he could do anything in this state! 

The thought flashes into his mind to run, try to flee, but his legs would not survive the attempt, he is sure, and maybe a moving target would be more attractive to them…

The Valkyr Warframe gets closer and, Profit, he’d forgotten — he only ever had one to work with, just one, but that was the first of its kind, he is sure, all the others based on what its fellows recovered from his labs, bearing those scars—

_—he was careful, so careful, he could not afford to damage vital components, and with each cut his knowledge grew, pulling viscera from the shell and recording every inch. He could feel the promise of profit, of success, under the Warframe’s flesh, and his scalpel was so gentle as he skinned it—_

—his insides freeze as the Valkyr in front of him stops, looming over him in a way that turns him very effectively to jelly; he can’t even swallow his throat is locked up tight, body pressed against the backrest of the bench as if trying to phase through it.

_He’d spoken to it then, while he worked. Does it remember what he said? Does he?_

The Warframe is faceless, expressionless, and therefore he has no way of predicting that it will reach down and lay the points of its claws against his thigh, just short of his knee. He flinches at its touch, sucking in a harsh, staccato breath, and the pricking sensation quickly becomes five points of pain as the Valkyr’s claws pierce his clothes and flesh. 

It does nothing but watch him, silently, pressing its claws into his leg, and he feels like he’s going to come apart from terror, this war machine has him helpless and it _hates him_ , they all do, but this one _in particular_ — he doesn’t know how Warframes reproduce themselves, take one lone individual and copy it out into a hundred duplicates on the model, he knows the original Valkyr, his victim, was only retrieved by the Lotus’s agents after permanent death, but he has sometimes wondered if the copies hold the memories and experiences of the original and this, this might be his proof, evidence that they all remember what he did to them and his mouth flaps open and shut _I’m sorry, sweet Profit I’m so sorry, don’t hurt me, please, please._

With a crystal clear air of derision, the Valkyr jerks its claws free of his leg and flicks them; Alad flinches, his whole body recoiling, and warm, stinging droplets of his own blood spatter on his face. He’s paralyzed, shaking, as the Vaklyr straightens up and walks away, leaving him with the distinct impression it was laughing at him.

That’s fine, he thinks, trembling too badly to move, laughing is fine. Anything short of taking his life in much-deserved vengeance is fine.

At the edges of his attention he sees the rest of the Tenno crowd moving on, helmets turning away from him after the Valkyr’s display. He grips his cane franticly, trying in vain to control his breathing. He can’t stay here, he can’t be out in the open, he’s too exposed, too _vulnerable_ —

His first attempt to stand fails, legs refusing to cooperate, but his second produces results. He wobbles, unsteady even with the cane, and he forces himself to move. His terror is so great that it’s minutes before he realizes where he’s going, and he has to yank his attention to his surroundings to find his way back to the infirmary. 

When Rocket sees him, she screeches and almost storms off to take revenge before he grabs her wrist, his grip feeble but unbreaking. “Don’t,” he stammers, “I’m fine.”

“You’re not _fine_ ,” she hisses, but settles for throwing him bodily into his infirmary bed once he’s cleaned his face of half-dried blood spatters, and then slithers under the covers to nestle against his chest unhappily.

She can’t jeopardize their position here, he thinks, she must realize that. It’s precarious enough as it is. But, the back of his brain whispers, it may tip with or without her interference. Tenno tolerance of his presence is by no means unanimous, as the faint sting in his thigh reminds him — shallow punctures, easy enough to heal on their own, but painful nonetheless. How long until that Valkyr decides vengeance would be better served by removing his head from his body? He swallows, feeling a phantom hand around his throat. 

He’s got to get out of here. 

 

——————————

 

“If I had known you would be stopping by, I would have dressed up a bit more.”

Miraculously, Ergo Glast had come to visit. 

He gives a wry chuckle and pulls a chair from near the wall, settling himself. “I was on Larunda, but news travels fast, you know. I left as soon as I heard.”

Larunda is orbiting Mercury, half a solar system away. Alad is impressed, he’s made good time. “I’m not sure what you’re expecting. I’m not in any condition to be of much use.” Body broken, accounts frozen. He’s been working on remedying the second, but he can only do so much from a hospital bed. As much as it rankles him, he may be forced to accept… help, from professional hackers.

Glast shakes his head. “Use is immaterial. I fancied a game with an old acquaintance, after your many adventures.”

Alad snorts. “You’re making fun of me.” But he levers himself up as best he can, Glast unfolding the three-tiered chessboard and setting it on the tray between them. 

And it’s… nice. Soothing, a simple game to stretch his mind, a problem to solve that’s not threatening his life, for once. He fumbles a few moves at the start, out of practice, and Glast takes a few pieces Alad wishes he hadn’t, but he hits his stride soon enough, and matches Glast’s capture count. 

They continue on like this for a while, a pleasing mental exercise. It’s after a particularly clever feint that ends in the capture of one of Glast’s towers that the Tenno walks in. 

It’s a Nova model, walking past but doing a double-take at the open doorway. Alad blinks at it, apprehensive, but Glast appears unruffled. He nods politely, and the Warframe apparently takes this as leeway to enter and examine the board. Up close he can see the spiky adornments on its shoulders, and the gold piping that tells him it’s a Prime model. A half-dormant part of his brain sparkles thinking about it, but he ignores it and flaps his hands limply at the Warframe. “Shoo.”

The Tenno’s head tilts, attentive, and makes a complicated hand gesture at Glast. “It’s a game,” the Perrin chairman replies, “and I’m winning.”

Alad bristles, and proves him wrong by capturing the clergy Glast’s left conveniently undefended. Glast’s mouth twitches and quickly returns the favor, making Alad sputter with indignation. “You’re still not very good at this.”

Alad huffs, gesturing to the Warframe crouching so as to be on brow level with the board, examining it eyelessly. “I am distracted, and ill besides.”

The Nova makes another hand movement, which makes Glast laugh in the manner of someone who’s just been told something inappropriate*. “You are lucky he can’t read that,” he says to the Warframe, whose posture indicates mirth.

Alad scowls, crossing his arms. “Are you going to bother to translate, Ergo?”

Glast shakes his head, goodnatured. “No, but I might teach you how to read their sign language, it might come in handy now.”

“For a price, naturally.”

Glast inclines his head. “Naturally.” They are still Corpus, after all. 

Before Alad can take his next turn, the Warframe stands and sets something down on the second level of the board. The sound it makes is heavy, a solid _clunk_ that indicates something sturdier than printed polymers. Alad frowns, peering at it.

It’s a small statue of an animal’s head, carved in dense blue-green stone, the neck of the thing terminating in a sturdy base. Gingerly, he picks it up, and is surprised at its weight. Is this coral? He’s never seen coral that color, how unusual…

Glast’s face is alive with interest. “A knight! My, they haven’t been made in that style for eons. Where did you get this?” That last addressed to the Tenno, who gestures a response.

Glast translates: “‘The Sea, before. I don’t need it, I already saw the moth hatch.’ Have you any idea what that means?”

Alad shakes his head, thoroughly confused. “Not a one.” Moth? Does it mean the newer frame Titania? He gets the feeling he should question the Nova, but the novelty of the… knight, distracts him. The color is so rich, it feels like it’s tugging on his memory. But he’s sure he’s never seen it before…

The Tenno is halfway to the door before he realizes they’ve moved, and he opens his mouth to say — what? But they’re already gone. Perplexed, he looks back to the chess piece he’s been given, turning it over in his hand. He finishes the game without it, even though Glast shows him how it matches the function of the modern tank piece and could easily be substituted in. It unnerves him, for reasons he can’t explain. Or maybe the fact that it was given to him by a Tenno is explanation enough.

Regardless, he loses, and Glast orders tea for the two of them as consolation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translation of Tenno sign: "Isn't purposefully losing at chess sapiosexual bottoming?"
> 
> I honestly have no idea if I'll write more of this before the next century, but I really want to.


	17. Chapter 17

He wakes sluggishly, disoriented at first and opening his eyes into darkness. He can’t feel his feet and there’s a moment of sickening panic before he remembers what’s been done to him. He struggles to think, still half asleep, and then his heart rate jumps.

There’s a shadow above him, sucking the air out of the room, and he thinks _Tenno_ and flails, choking on a scream. 

A hand touches his face, holding him firmly still. “Hush! Ow, ow stop.”

He stops trying to claw the hand off him as the neurons click together. He groans softly, body going limp. “Why…”

His monster strokes his face softly. “I’m tired of standing guard.”

Her hand is cool, and he’s overheated in the night, uncomfortably warm. He shifts to lift the covers. “Get under here. You don’t really think they’d assassinate me in the night do you?”

She snorts, burrowing under. “You thought they would, freaking out like that.”

He has no response to that. She takes his silence as acquiescence and settles on top of him, sighing almost inaudibly. 

He’s tired. Healing from amputation takes energy, and the casually looming threat of some Tenno getting impatient or fed up or just bored and doing him in for fun is taking its toll. His eyes drift closed… and open again when she starts nosing under his jaw. “Pet, please…”

“I’m snacky.”

“I’m weak enough as it is, I don’t need to add anemia onto my list of ailments.”

She huffs and nestles into him, but doesn’t so much as nibble. “You haven’t been sleeping well.” 

He hasn’t noticed her sleeping at all. “What makes you say that?”

“Nightmare symptoms.”

He frowns, thinking back, and his mind flinches away from whatever fragmented memories he has of before she woke him up with her _looming_. She feels his body twitch and rubs her cheek against his. “I’ll kill them before I let them hurt you.” He imagines he can see a dull, red glow from her eyes, barely perceptible. “ _I’m_ the only one allowed to hurt you.”

He tilts his head forward and kisses her softly, a slow slide of lips. Tiredness weakens his guard, lets his tongue make decisions his brain would have vetoed. “You are making me seriously question my self preservation precepts…”

She purrs softly, cupping his cheek in one hand. “Sweetest things you say.”

He’s exhausted, longing for rest, but sleep is a black ocean right now, too full of horrors to step back into. He pulls her closer, letting her coax him into a state of shameful neediness, hungry for skin contact. She purrs and ruts slowly, pushing his thin shirt up and tasting her way down his sallow chest. She can be insatiable sometimes, but even with his mind fogged from tiredness he’s glad of the distraction, grateful for the chance to lose himself in touch again. 

He needs this, he reasons to himself, and he needs her to stay. She’s all he’s got left now. 

So he doesn’t complain when she gets his sleep pants down around his thighs, doesn’t raise apprehensions about real sex in a hospital bed that’s almost certainly being monitored. His body is needy and eager and responds to her insistent presence so intensely that he’s blushing and stifling small noises in minutes. 

She purrs, rutting slowly against him, cool hands riffling up his shirt and causing goosebumps to rise on his skin. After a few minutes she gets bored with that and grasps his thin wrists, pinning him to the mattress. He quivers, too on edge to be graceful, and gasps shamefully when he feels her slick against his cock. 

He’s pathetic. How could anyone here think him a threat when she owns him so completely?

She mouths wetly at his neck and he moans, waiting for the scrape of teeth that doesn’t come. The thought flits through his head that she won’t hurt me and he almost laughs because of course she would, she would tear him open and lave every organ with her tongue, pressing kisses to his very heart. 

The thought makes him gasp, and he’s left to wonder if maybe he isn’t a wee bit fucked up now. 

Fortunately he isn’t left time to dwell on it, his monster rocking her hips something awful and making him keen openly. 

He lets her ride him, pinned down and aching, listening to the rasp her breath makes, the soft vibrating moans out his own chest. She chews gently on his shoulder, careful not to break skin, and her spidery fingers around his wrists are unyielding, tight enough to make his fingertips go numb.

He closes his eyes and arches up.

His monster abruptly stops, Alad’s breath catching in his throat, and twists her torso around at the suddenly cracked open door.

The wash of light across his face, relatively weak but blinding to his eyes, makes him freeze; _intruder!_ Rocket hisses like a viper and launches herself off the bed at the blurry figure staggering back out of the doorway, howling, _“I wasn’t done you prick!”_ He yelps and curls over in on himself in her sudden absence, wanting very much for that inevitable Tenno assassin to make itself useful and end his life. His groin aches, only overshadowed by his dignity, currently pulverized on the floor.

He almost hopes Rocket kills their witness.

To his dismay, she returns minutes later, unbloodied and sour. He preemptively shields his groin, fearing the kind of determined intensity she sometimes brings, like she’s willing to cripple him in pursuit of an orgasm, but she just flops beside him and sulks.

He’ll never, ever, live that down.

 

——————————————————————————————————————————

 

His prosthetic function gradually improves, in inverse proportion to his cabin fever. He pushes himself almost to the point of further injury, argues with the station Cephalon, and viciously avoids eye contact with most of the medical staff.

In a fit of frustration, they give him an apartment on the floor above the main concourse. He is healed enough not to need constant medical attention anymore, and his presence in the med bay is getting disruptive, and quite honestly he’s sick of being an invalid. He’d like a private shower, thank you very much. And a lock on his door.

It’s nice, small and plainly furnished, but in good repair. Clean water comes out the tap, heat comes out small grates in the walls, and nothing shrieks out of the darkness at him. At least, nothing he doesn’t want shrieking out of the darkness at him.

Rocket sniffs out four listening devices within an hour of setting foot in the place, and crunches the bugs between her molars before spitting circuits and plastic chips down the waste disposal unit. 

“You shouldn’t have done that, they’ll only hide them better next time.”

She snorts, prickly. “This place is mine now, I won’t let them in.”

Alad sighs and lets it go. His legs are aching and the greasy slide of his hand through his hair makes him grimace, stumping towards the apartment facilities. 

At least that’s something to say for station life. The showers are excellent.

He is not given too much time to get comfortable; in exchange for board and medical care, the relay expects him to work. His plans for upgraded legs are delayed by weeks, as apparently he’s the first half-decent roboticist they’ve had in a long time, and everyone and their grandmother has some residence appliance or other that needs repairing. Most of the work is beneath him, to be honest, and he gets the feeling they still don’t entirely trust him not to reprogram tame service ospreys to turn on their owners, because all of his early repairs are inspected to an almost insulting level, but he’s in no position to make a fuss. They could just as easily throw him out to fend for himself.

Rocket has no such technical skills, despite her self-professed medical knowledge. She’s put on combat duty, to assist Tenno on syndicate assignments and, on one notable occasion, to clear out a nest of crawling, rodent-like insects that had infested the storage decks below the concourse. The upshot of all this is that she returns to him with snippets of information about Warframe combat operations that had not been visible from the other side.

She’s also started spending more time at the firing range, learning the operations of any long-range weapons the relay has in stock for practice use. This puzzles him, as she’s never shown that much interest in shooting things before, only avoiding getting shot herself. She’s such a hands-on fighter, it’s odd to think of her with a gun. 

He also, free of charge — a very generous act, in his mind — gives them information on the monster of Europa. The Tenno must truly be insane, because they practically line up for coordinates to the thing’s last sighting. It’s almost a shame there’s only one, so many of them are going to come home disappointed. Would the wendigo’s powers even work on a Warframe? In his studies he’s found no evidence of a digestive system, no one’s ever seen one eating or consuming anything other than void energy, so the thing’s ravenous aura may simply bounce off them. 

And, for reasons unknown to any sane being, some of them have even started following him around. A handful in a threatening manner, like that distinctive Valkyr from before, but most out of some impulse he can’t for the life of him discern. He knows that different frames can somehow emit the same void signature, indicating that either they run in family groups of similar energy patterns, or whatever a Tenno ultimately is can somehow exchange control of given Warframes. The fact that various frames seem to match behavior over multiple days, and that no two Warframes with identical signatures have yet been observed in the same space as each other, supports the second hypothesis.

He wishes more than ever that he had not been driven off their revelation at Lua by the Stalker and his minions. All that knowledge torn from his grasp…

But, over time, he notices the same “faces,” for lack of a better term, cropping up. A Titania colored yellow and black, like a hornet. An orange and cream Volt Prime wearing the helm of the base version. The Nova Prime that gifted him the coral “knight” piece, colored red and navy, and venting lime green at the ports on the frame’s back and head. Perhaps the Tenno behind the masks are using the same visage each time, as a courtesy towards him?

A greater courtesy would be verbal speech, but he knows too well that only a single model frame contains vocal cords, and those seem to have been grown out of sheer spite. They sign at him, but he’s as blind to that as they are mute, and it’s a state of mutual frustration. Can’t they just write? Or use the collective relay forum boards? His observation indicates that they may have their own forums within the relay, but access between that and the civilian boards is completely cut off.

Ergo Glast, true to his offer, makes an effort to teach Alad the rudimentary Tenno sign that seems to be the only true method of communication between Warframes and the general public, short of attempting to pantomime requests in a frankly embarrassing manner. Without the external hard drive in his headpiece it’s slow going, but he starts recognizing a handful of words. Fortunately he doesn’t need to perform the gestures himself; the Tenno are just mute, not deaf, and seem to understand spoken language perfectly well. 

And he’s given plenty of opportunity to practice.

 

————————————

 

He’s squinting at a dense bundle of hair-thin wires, picking at it with a set of tweezers. He’s lost the central thread, and needs to connect it to the gyroscope destined for a future inside his prosthetic calf. A click makes him look up, worksore eyes taking a moment to focus; that Nova Prime regular is back, leaning against his desk. He’s long since given up trying to keep them out of his apartment, locks are useless and they seem to have little concept of private space. 

“What is this?” the Tenno signs at him, head tilted in a way he reads as interest. 

“A… project.” Sensing that his previous “projects” have not exactly fostered friendship between them, he backtracks. “Nothing to do with you, certainly. I need something to occupy my time, that’s all.”

A single word comes signed back. “Why?”

He blinks. “Why? What do you mean, why?”

No response, just that eyeless stare. He huffs, put off. “Some of us need more in our lives than killing.” A nasal snort from the couch, where his creature is pretending to nap. He ignores her. “It… soothes me. And besides, the prosthetics they fit me with are factory-made, no customization at all. I want better ones, I have the capacity to make them, so that’s what I’m doing.”

The Nova is silent for a moment, then pushes off from his desk and is gone.

Alad sniffs, and goes back to work.

 

—————————————

 

The next day, the Nova returns with a metal crate balanced jauntily on its hip.

“What’s this?” Alad manages as it ignores his indecency — he’s only just risen, still in bedclothes! — and saunters in.

The Tenno sets the crate down with comically little effort, exacerbated by the sound the thing makes when it hits the floor. He won’t be able to shift it alone, that’s for sure. 

“A gift,” the Tenno signs at him, “bones.”

“Erm,” Alad says. “Thank you?”

Then the Tenno draws a sword, sticks the pointy end under the crate’s lid, and leans on the holding end until the lid pops open. Alad’s expression goes from polite confusion to shock and amazement, with some interesting stops at disbelief along the way. “Tenno,” he whispers, staring at the contents of the box, “thank you…”

The Warframe holsters its sword, signing back. “That’s better.” Its smug, but he doesn’t care, because inside the box is mechanical shards, coated in cracked blue enamel on some sides. Here and there a strut, half a limb, a fragment of internal workings.

It’s brought him Zanuka’s corpse. 

He doesn’t ask how, doesn’t ask why this Tenno, why _any_ Tenno would want to keep the twice-dead cannibalized parts of their fellows. One does not look a gift proxy in its joints, as they say. He can use this! The base materials he has access to here are sorely lacking; with these components, he can build himself top-of-the-line prosthetics!

He dives in with an enthusiasm he hasn’t felt in months, emptying the crate onto the apartment floor and taking stock of what he’s got to work with. Armor plating in jagged shards, circuitry by the skein, one completely intact hind foot, limp and slightly dented.

It didn’t save much of the weapons systems, but that’s alright. He wasn’t planning on having rocket launchers for feet. He wonders if his Tenno admirer sold the plasma cannons and flashbombs or if it simply discarded them, but the thought is quickly gone. He makes a reflexive motion towards his head, reaching for his headpiece, before he remember it isn’t there. Cursing in frustration he scrambles up for a notepad and starts scratching down a plan, a rough draft of how he is to proceed.

The Warframe watches him work with something that might be interest, or boredom, or distraction. They’re so hard to read, mute and faceless like mannequins, he’s given up trying to figure out what they’re thinking. If they even are thinking. It makes no comment as he sorts pieces, pries circuit chips out of metal fragments, lifts off the enamel to use as plating for his new limbs. 

He’s so engrossed in his work that he doesn’t notice when Rocket slinks back into their quarters, eyeing the Warframe warily but settling for a derisive snort. She settles herself in one of the uncomfortable armchairs like an offended feline, and ostensibly goes to sleep. The Nova sits cross-legged, motionless; at times he looks up and startles, having forgotten it’s even there.

Three days later, he has a working prototype.


	18. Chapter 18

It’s like learning to walk for the third time.

He’s upgraded the gyroscopes so the prosthetics are practically self-balancing, but his nervous system wants to fight with them instead of letting them do their job, and it’s a hassle and a half training himself to trust when his weight suddenly shifts without permission. The feet are a hybrid of Moa design and Zanuka’s paws, three-toed with grippy rubber padding, and a fourth backwards facing digit for stability. They’re pleasingly tactile, and he finds he can even use them to pick up objects and transfer them to his hands without having to bend over painfully, so long as he’s holding onto something. 

Zanuka’s salvaged muscle is stronger than he needs it to be, and he has a few issues with accidentally kicking holes in things before he finds the trick for dialing it down to manageable levels. It holds his weight just fine, though, and the alloys are combat-grade, still strong and flexible. Overall, he is very pleased with the result, and is ready for a longer test run sooner than predicted. 

He’s almost not surprised when the Nova Prime matches stride with him halfway down the hall from his lodging. Rocket had been possessive lately, once or twice getting into one-sided shouting matches with a Warframe; she’d picked up on the frames’ sign language much faster than Alad, and her retorts were lightning-quick.

But most Warframes here seemed to prefer that to outright combat, except where the conclave was concerned, but Rocket wasn’t permitted in there anyway. No non-Tenno were. So the debates were fairly harmless. 

The Nova Prime signs a mild hello, tilting its head to examine his prosthetics as they walk. He hardly stumbles now, the gyroscopes finally playing nice with his brain, and he feels much steadier than before. The Warframe seems to approve.

It keeps pace with him for a while, following him down a lift onto the main concourse. The population appears to have gotten used to him by now, and the odd looks and murmurs have mostly stopped. People have to get on with their lives, he supposes, and novelty wears off eventually.

His Tenno escort suddenly jumps, an arm shooting up in a dramatic wave. Alad startles, hopping back a step, but then follows the attention of the Warframe to see what’s made it react so. There, across the concourse, an Excalibur frame in blacks and reds. It turns its head, seeming to watch the Nova Prime wave, and then his hair stands on end as its attention refocuses onto him. 

_This_ Tenno has malice. 

But it turns its head fractionally back towards the Nova, and raises its hands to sign something. Alad squints to read the gestures, but at this distance it’s difficult; he picks up “rude,” “seen you,” and “echoes,” but that’s about it. 

His guide brings one hand to the lower portion of its helm, almost as if covering a laugh; its shoulders shake in concert. It signs back rapidfire, and the Excalibur makes a dismissive, wordless gesture and turns. On its back is painted a sigil for the Arbiters of Hexis.

Well.

The Nova Prime seems to laugh again, waving the other frame off by flapping one hand at the wrist. “Er,” Alad says elegantly. “Am I causing damage to your social standing?”

That makes the Warframe wave at him dismissively, still seeming mirthful. He wants to ask what that whole silent conversation was about, but he doubts he’ll get a straight answer. These things never seem to talk straight with him. Or, from what he’s seen, with anyone.

 

——————————————————————————————————————————

 

He’s got his nose an inch from the insides of a belligerent maintinence drone when something clatters to his desk, making him jump a foot in the air. Rocket leans on his shoulder. “You’re gonna wanna see this.”

He grumbles, forcing his hand to let go of the solder pen he had been gripping way too tight. His hand aches, joints complaining after hours of tiny, close work. “What is it?”

He fumbles for the small audio recorder she’d dropped into his work space, Rocket leaning back against the desk. “I was in the basements, you know where frickin no one ever goes? And I found Warframes.”

“There are Warframes everywhere here.”

“Nuh-uh. _Dead_ ones.”

He looks at her flatly. “Dead Warframes.”

She huffs, crossing her arms and gesturing with her chin at the recorder. “Just listen.”

He gives her a look, but flips the on switch. There’s a series of muffled scrapings, fabric moving uncomfortably close to the receiver, and high hissing voices in the background, unintelligible. The static gradually clears and the voices grow clearer.

“—and _then_ they spent half the mission in Titania’s ult, zipping around and making fart noises in my ear.” It’s a vaguely deep voice, serious in all but words.

“In my defense,” a second pipes up, higher, “you definitely tripped those alarms on purpose.”

“ _You_ did that!”

“I was pushed!”

Cue a chorus of laughs and jeers, jovial and light.

“Listen if you’re just going to judge me,” the second voice gripes, “then I will get the fuck back in that robot, you just watch.”

“But Lark,” the first responds, smug, “you haven’t finished eating all our food yet.”

“Look I am _trying_ , okay, you can _see_ my pockets are full already! I just don’t have anywhere to put it! Ordis thinks I’m sabotaging the coolant, I just want to build a damn fridge.” There’s a resigned sigh and some good-natured laughter. Alad realizes his mouth is open and hastily closes it. These are _Tenno?_

_Talking?_

One of the others suggests using an ice mod inside a box, to more laughter. There’s another rattle of static, the recorder being fidgeted with. Another pipes up, “just crack open a glaxion?”

A snort in response. “Do I look like I want to lose an arm? I had enough frostbite on that fucking mountain.”

“Speaking of weapons,” a new voice this time, “you still owe me those Perrin pistols.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m working on that.” 

“And Mutagen samples.”

“I knooooooww.”

“What,” Alad says slowly, the recording guttering out, “am I supposed to make of that?”

“Hell if I know.” Rocket’s forehead is furrowed, uneasy. “I couldn’t get closer, the frames started to wake up and I had to scarper.”

Alad frowns further, turning the information over in his head. He doesn’t like it, not knowing things. Information has always been too precious to let go, and information about the Tenno is most valuable of all. This feels _significant._

He sighs, frustrated. “See if you can get more like this, find out what they’re hiding.”

She snorts softly. “Cause I just love hanging out in air vents all day.” But her tone is mild; not like she’s got anything else really interesting to do. Not even allowed to terrorize the people here, what a ripoff.

 

——————————————————————————————————————————

 

He should have known, he should have predicted that this couldn’t last. He was just getting comfortable, just beginning to be secure in his position again, just barely used to relay life and the close, unnerving presence of so many Warframes, and his new, sentimentally familiar legs.

Rocket was just beginning to relax.

He wakes to sirens with a sick, empty feeling in his gut, dread like awful confirmation of something he hadn’t known he was afraid of. The noise is painful and he struggles to hook his leg ports into the Zanuka prosthetics while also protecting his ears. Dimly, under the racket, he can hear Rocket barreling for the door.

Finally able to stand, he hoofs it.

Day/night cycles are rotated on the relay, each rough third of the population out of sync with the others; there are always people on staff, always people engaging in recreation, always people sleeping. But the crowd he sees is larger than any other he’s seen here, what must be the entire population packed into the concourse and surrounding walkways.

And no wonder; high above the concourse floor, roughly level with the residential floor looking out over the center of the relay, is the ugly face of Vay Hek.

_“Vermin!”_ the projection bellows, _“Too long has this, this relay been left standing, an insult to Grineer Superiority! Too long have the Tenno scum been allowed to fester! NO LONGER! Your precious relay will soon be dust, Tenno instigators ripped limb! From! Limb! And all those juicy little traitors too, and, heh, greedy Corpus worms hiding in this nest. Fomorian Commander! Advance!”_

The transmission cuts out, leaving behind a countdown clock reading a handful of hours and a deadly pregnant silence. A collective breath is drawn in; distantly, someone starts to cry.

“We’re going to die,” someone says into the quiet, and gets her arm walloped for her trouble.

“No we’re not,” the walloping neighbor hisses, “they’ve threatened the relay before, right?”

The doomsday sayer rubs her arm, offended. “Yeah, and there used to be seven relays.” She looks up again at the clock. “I wouldn’t bet on our odds.”

Her neighbor opens her mouth to argue but is cut off by a sharp retort, harsh like a habitual smoker’s. “Vay Hek is a desperate fool, there are more Tenno here than anywhere else in the system right now.” Alad is alarmed to see a tall, armored figure, unmistakably Grineer; it takes him a second to place Cressa Tal of Steel Meridian. He gulps, quickly turning his head in hopes of avoiding attention. 

He feels faint, chest aching. Fomorians are more than capable of taking apart a small moon, never mind an unshielded relay. A solid hit from one of those cannons would crack the station apart, he’s seen it happen.

He watched those other four relays die.

“And,” Tal continues, seemingly oblivious to the panic attack waiting to happen five feet from her, “I know for a fact that fomorian cores have not been improved upon one damned bit since his last blind attempt. The same tactics that worked last time will work now.”

“But what if they can’t—” the pessimist starts, and is cut off again.

“Then we will _survive_. Even if — _even if_ — we can’t save the relay, we will survive. You better believe that.”

She shoots a _look_ at Alad’s sick-looking face, making him straighten up in instinctive offended pride — old rivalries really do die hard — and marches off into the crowd, calling what must be her lieutenants to her. 

The relay’s lack of a fleet, it’s lack of any sizable combat ships, any ships at all beyond single-pilot skiffs and transport trucks, sticks like a bone in his throat. He wants the security of warships, of dedicated fighting vessels packed to the gills with guns and shields and escape pods. They have _none_ of that here, he feels hideously exposed.

But the Tenno have archwings.

For reasons unknown, Tenno have never used battleships. For reasons unknown, they are far more effective solo, strapped into individual propulsion systems and flitting around asteroid fields like so many deadly wasps. They’d fought these things before, haven’t they? There’s a reason there are still relays in the system, a reason Vay Hek is close to disgrace in the eyes of the Queens.

_So,_ he muses distantly, analyzing the sharp 180 degree shift in his emotions, _this is how they do it._ This is how they garner such loyalty throughout the civilian and rebel groups of the system. Because they do foolish things like this, risk their lives defending soft, vulnerable port stations. Not because he’d paid them to do it, or presented his preservation as the most logical course of action, but just… because.

Because they feel like it.

He shakes his head, marveling.

 

——————————————

 

“I’m en route, suiting up now.”

“Don’t be late, Lark, the squad ahead of us is taking a beating.”

“I know, _I know._ ”

Frame doesn’t matter, picks Nova regardless. It’s comfortable. Archwing’s gotta be the healer, they’ll need those precious seconds of invulnerability. Shame they can’t boost it further, but no time to gripe about that now.

Guns and sword take seconds to arm. The relay, a glittering silver spinning-top shape below the Orbiter. And their target, that huge, organ-like ship, bulbous and haloed by rings of defenders. It’ll be a hard fight getting through, even harder to do their damage and get out without losing a frame permanently. Maybe Nova hadn’t been the best choice, they’re so attached to this one.

No time to worry about that now, drop’s in thirty seconds.

Stupid fucking fomorians.

The deployer spins around, airlock hissing, and drops them into zero-G. Solid thunks shake the Warframe as the archwing locks into place. The squad chat blooms in their vision, hollers and war cries from three other Tenno; Rickwell practically screaming eagerness, Holley intoning that peculiar pre-combat chant. Cal quietly confirming Lark’s presence. They nod back, giving a two-fingered salute with their free hand.

They’re ready.


	19. Chapter 19

They’re three hours into the eight hour countdown when the first missiles hit.

The fomorian itself isn’t close enough yet, won’t be for another five hours, but the forefront of its advance guard is just within range. The projectiles are small, practically harmless against the relay’s meager armor, but they accomplish their purpose well enough.

People start to panic. 

All the private transport tugs had been filled up and escaped within two hours of Vay Hek’s message, and now all that’s left is a handful of emergency escape pods, currently under Tenno guard. They won’t say why they’re guarding them, what they could possibly be saving them for, and that, on top of everything, causes panic to rise.

Then the shots hit and there’s a blind rush for them, which results in a messy laying down of the Tenno law; no one gets past a Volt packed with power duration mods. 

Now it’s a tense sort of calm, more the absence of rioting than anything, while the occasional slug bounces off the relay’s armor. 

Rocket’s pacing the length of the apartment, snarling to herself and prickly as she’s ever been before.

Alad’s already been sick once down the waste disposer, still feeling like he might cough up another awful mouthful of bile given half a chance.

Two hours later, and no change.

An hour after that, another civilian group makes a run for the escape pods. This time, the Volt lets them pass.

They take them all.

Now the panicking starts in earnest.

——————————————

“Dodge— no, other left!”

Hot metal slugs ping off Cal’s shields, throwing him back in a loop. His archwing’s back thrusters fire, killing his momentum and rocketing him forward again; the Grineer gunpod splits neatly in two, giving the transport enough room to slip past the offensive line and make a break for the relay.

Rickwell radios in, the disruptors are working but not working fast enough, and the estimate of time to fatal core damage ticks serenely past Vay Hek’s countdown. _Where are the rest of them?_

A streak of blue catches his eye; Lark extracting ahead of time, tagging out and allowing a fresher frame to take their place. Cal hisses, frustrated. This isn’t going to work.

——————————————

The Tenno appear to have defaulted to plan B. Half a dozen transport ships docked and taking passengers, escorted in and out of the danger zone by archwinged frames. The syndicate staff had taken the first one, all of them crammed in together regardless of personal grudges and animosities. Alad’s sure that’ll turn out completely fine, no one getting shanked at all. Sure.

Alad would already be on a shuttle himself, but Rocket vanished between one blink and the next and he, he won’t leave, he _can’t_ leave. 

Not without her.

(And he’s given up trying to pretend it’s purely utilitarian, given up the pretense of just using her for protection long ago. He doesn’t want to put words to it, seems violently allergic to it in fact, but it’s. It’s something. Yes.)

Now it’s his turn to pace restlessly, one eye glued to the countdown clock hovering over the concourse. His Nova — he doesn’t even know when he’d started making that distinction — is nowhere to be seen, only a bare handful of Tenno left on the relay to direct civilians. He wonders how they determine which Tenno are delegated to traffic duty, in a vain attempt to distract himself. 

It doesn’t work.

The clock ticks gradually downwards. Twenty minutes to relay death.

The concourse is nearly empty.

Something abruptly hits him from behind, grabbing him roughly and the world spins. He yelps, thrown for a loop, but recognizes the situation quickly enough; Rocket’s got him comically over her shoulder, booking it down a side hallway.

“W-what—”

“We’re not getting on the civilian ships,” she cuts him off, “it’s too risky. Half of them are already captured, and if that happens to us we’re dead in the water.” She takes a sharp turn, inertia making Alad’s head pulse. “I got us a skiff but we gotta go now.”

He swallows an objection with some difficulty and lets himself be carted.

(She hadn’t abandoned him she hadn’t taken the first shuttle and left, how could he even have thought that she would never she—)

His train of thought is thrown abruptly off the rails by an explosion, almost causing Rocket to fall. The structure shakes violently, the creaking of metal under strain very evident. He yelps, clinging to her. “Hurry!”

She launches forward, the hallway behind them crumpling like so much aluminum tubing. Slung over his monster’s shoulder, ass disgracefully in air, Alad’s got an excellent view of their path eaten up behind them with jagged metal and the beginnings of what promises to be a spectacular fire. 

A turn and a half more, and Rocket abruptly chucks him off her, landing him in an uncomfortably upholstered pod seat. She wrenches the door shut behind them, locking it manually, and is mashing at the controls when the pod jerks violently and Alad hears the telltale cracks of mooring struts snapping.

(Later he will ask her how she was planning to fly the thing, and she will ask him in return what he thought she was doing with all her spare time on the relay.)

Alad tries and fails not to scream, Rocket swearing fit to make his hair curl, and the next few minutes are in sudden silence, due to the literally deafening roar of a fomorian’s main cannon tearing through the relay like so much paper.

The world is fire and impacts and sharp, hellish ringing in his ears. He thinks he feels the pod’s thrusters kicking in, or maybe that was just debris colliding with the hull. Another series of crashes, sharp, jarring collisions, and a blocky helmet is shoved over his head.

He can’t breathe for a fat second and then cool, sterile air fills his lungs; the helmet has an oxygen supply.

The terror in his stomach triples — no no he should not need that, the hull should be solid _there should be no holes in the hull_ — and then there’s no more room for emotion because the pod cracks like an egg around them and his vision is filled with the glowing blue-white of the planet below. 

His clothes vacuum tight to his skin as the meager atmosphere of the pod boils away, his skin tingling with the beginnings of pain as empty space sucks at him; Rocket sails into view, helmetless, eyes and mouth shut tight and hands over her ears and oh, no, no helmet she doesn’t need air but the pressure, her _brain—_

And then his view of bright Pluto is blocked by something dark and gunmetal-grey, edges flaring like the corona of an eclipse. He can’t move, his sporadic flailings completely pointless without anything to push off of, he’s helpless when something long and thin whips out of a hatch on the thing’s surface and grabs his monster around one leg.

He yells, tinny in his metal helmet and against his still-ringing ears. Rocket vanishes from view and the tendril returns, whipping out almost in slow motion and lashing itself around his waist. His skin burns, cells wanting to come apart under the greedy, sucking pressure of empty space, and there’s no sense of inertia or movement as the whip reels him in.

His diaphragm seizes, he can’t draw breath, and his vision gutters out before he’s within arms reach of the dark bulkhead.

—————————————————————————————————————————

His chest aches.

He greets this fact first with annoyance, and then with a sharp and delighted realization that he is alive. He marvels at this for a moment before attempting to open his eyes.

What he sees doesn’t make sense at first, until he turns his head and the world revolves, reforms into grey walls and conservative, smooth-edged tangles of machinery. He’s lying on his back.

A figure drifts into view; small, slight like a child, wearing a blue ribbed bodysuit and with the sides of their head shaved, leaving a blue-black fluff on top. They’re carrying a stack of bowls, and seeing them makes him register a sharp, spicy smell; it makes him cough, and the child moves past before he sees their face. 

He frowns, sitting up slowly. Inspection reveals that he’s on top of an unforgiving bench, and that his back is very loudly complaining about it. His surroundings are badly lit, and unfamiliar. He can see the child taking a seat in the next room, separating the stack of bowls out, and drawing a set of utensils. 

He stands, gingerly.

A mechanical voice startles him, sharp and prim. “Operator, there is a matter that requires your attention.”

“Yeah, I’ll get to him,” the child says, a tangle of pungent noodles en route to their mouth.

“Please understand, I do not feel comfortable with this… individual on board. Think of the sabotage he could enact!”

The Operator waves their utensil. “So zap him if he touches anything, I know you do it to the cat.”

The cephalon’s voice pitches up in a sharp whine. “All due respect, why do we even keep that creature? It is better than a hound, certainly, but it scratches my upholstery!”

“It’s a mascot,” the Operator says with their mouth full. “Every ship needs a mascot, it’s some kind of law.”

Alad purses his lips, saying nothing. He takes the opportunity to take stock of himself; alive, pain levels very low, his breathing easy. His prosthetics are intact and functioning, for which he is grateful, and he does not appear to have lost any more body parts. He spies the helmet _(don’t think about it don’t remember don’t wonder if)_ lying on some unused surface. 

He takes a step and nearly trips over some spinning golden ornament. How… tacky.

The child finally turns to look at him and Alad’s head twitches back in surprise; the gravity in the subtle lines of this person’s face belongs to someone much older. He feels as if he’s seen that weariness out of his own visage, sometimes, staring back at him out of a mirror.

Then the child’s mouth twists up in a pleased smile and the sensation is lost.

“You caught three of mine, you know.” Their smile grows wider at his expression. “Don’t worry, I got them back. I spent time in Wisdom, after all, and it was a lot harder escaping from there.”

This child is… eerily androgynous. Every time he thinks he can place a gender, or even a faction, they move in a way that disrupts his assumption. When they smile, which seems to be a lot, their eyes narrow in something almost like mirth; a web of knotted scar tissue extends from the tear duct of each eye, flowing outward, forming a pattern like a mask, indicative of… something. He can’t tell what.

He swallows. “You are Tenno.” Not a question. It makes… a strange kind of sense. The child’s eyes crinkle.

“Good! You got chased off before we figured it out, it’s been bugging me since then.”

“…this was what was hidden on the moon? _This_ is what the Lotus hid from you?”

“I know! You were right, she does make a damn good villain.” 

He bites back questions like _so why are you still following her_ and instead says, “That Nova, then — you?”

They nod. “Me.”

“…why a chess piece?”

“Oh! That! I thought it would be funny.”

Fortunately he’s saved the possibility of responding to that by a familiar warbling screech from elsewhere in the ship. The Tenno hums softly, turning their head. “Oh, she’s awake.”

“She—” _She’s alive_. Or not alive but semantics, doesn’t matter, he hadn’t realized he’d been keeping the possibility at arm’s reach, not touching it, until the potential futures collapsed into one, painfully relieving reality.

She’s alive, and she’s angry.

———————————

It’s… messy.

The Tenno hops down a slight ramp, keys in a short code to a console, and steps back.

The door immediately before them slides conveniently open just before Rocket would have hit it head-on, and the sudden lack of resistance sends her overshooting into the short hallway in the rear of the ship. She screeches, does a tight turn, and launches herself at the diminutive Tenno. Alad winces, bracing himself for Tenno puree, and is very surprised when he’s hit with a rebounded projectile of angry vampire.

Rocket yells, Alad crumpling exactly like someone still recovering from a traumatic double amputation, and the Tenno laughs. 

_Laughs._

Rocket’s face is murder on toast but Alad grabs her arms as best he can in the tangle and hisses, “Don’t! Do not jeopardize this!”

“Fucker put me with the virus!” 

“What?” Blinking, he focuses on the door she’d cannoned out of; it remains open, Infested tendrils visible beyond, waving gently like sea grass. Alad suppresses a shudder. Why is the Infestation _here_ — nevermind. “Regardless; do not.”

The Tenno, much to his relief, merely maintains that grin. They tossed Rocket aside like nothing, even outside the Warframes, they’re _smiling_ about it — profit, they’re unnerving with expressions. He almost misses the blank, expressionless helms he’s used to.

Rocket growls softly, but lets herself relax out of killing focus. “I don’t like this.”

Alad stands slowly, leg stumps protesting at the work. “Neither do I.” But it’s the only likely safe place they’ve got, now. And, this close to Tenno, profit always follows.

But, then again, so does death.

—————————

He insists on looking Rocket over. There’s blood matting her hair, black and sticky, and he winces. “How well can you hear me?”

She scowls. “Fine.”

He shines a small light into her ear, trying to see past the blood. “Your eardrums may be damaged, give me details.”

“…muffled. Buzzing. But I’m fine, it’ll heal.”

He hums and bends to press his ear to her chest. “Breathe.”

She does so, and he hears crackling, like paper. Ruptured alveoli, from the air being sucked out of her lungs. That will probably heal too. She huffs and leans against him, inhaling a few times, and he thinks she’s testing her lung function but then she presses her face against the top of his head.

He goes a bit warm, acutely aware of the claptrap cephalon watching them. Rocket growls, softly, the sound vibrating through her chest and into his head, and wraps her arms around his shoulders.

A normal person would have said _I’m glad it worked_. A normal person would have said _I was so fucking scared_. Neither of them are normal people, normal people do not communicate in the language of feral animal sounds and medical examinations.

She grips him tighter, and he lets her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More info on Operator Lark here:  
> http://churchyardgrim.tumblr.com/post/163058892257/everyone-else-is-doing-tenno-ocs-so-have-some
> 
> as always I have no idea where I'm going or when I'll scrap together another chapter but uhhhhhh give me feedback please! what do you like, what do you not like, what would you like to see happen later!


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